FIVE
LOVING THE STRANGER
. . . and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word.
Ephesians 5:25–26
Let’s recall the point made by Stanley Hauerwas:
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is . . . learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.1
Hauerwas’s realism rings true to people who have been married for a long time. Marriage changes us. Having children changes us. A career switch changes us. Age changes us. On top of everything else, marriage brings out and reveals traits in you that were there all along but were hidden from everyone including you, but now they are all seen by your spouse.
Most people enter marriage through the “in-love” experience, and at its peak it is euphoric. Two people can become almost obsessed with each other. Marriage counselor and author Gary Chapman argues that the in-love phase, which he believes usually lasts several months to two years, includes the illusion that the beloved is perfect in every aspect that matters. Describing one of his counselees, Jen, he writes: “Her best friend could see the flaws [in her fiancé]—it bothers her how he talks to Jen sometimes, but Jen won’t listen. Her mother, noting the young man seems unable to hold a steady job, keeps her concerns to herself but asks polite questions about ‘Ryan’s plans.’”
Chapman goes on to describe the condition:
Of course we are not totally naïve. We know intellectually that we will eventually have differences. But we are certain that . . . we will [quickly] reach agreement. . . . We are caught up in the beauty and charm of the other’s personality. Our love is the most wonderful thing we have ever experienced. We observe that some married couples seem to have lost that feeling but it will never happen to us. “Maybe they didn’t have the real thing,” we reason.2
The in-love experience passes when the flaws in the other person come home to us. Things that seemed small and inconsequential now loom large. We begin to feel that we did not really know the person after all. And this presents us with the challenge of loving a person who, at the moment, seems in large part a stranger, not the person you remember marrying.
When this happens, people respond in a number of different ways. If your purpose in marriage was to acquire a “soul mate”—a person who would not change you and would supportively help you reach your life goals—then this particular reality of marriage will be deeply disorienting. You wake up to the realization that your marriage will take a huge investment of time just to make it work. Just as distressing will be the discovery that your spouse finds you a stranger and has begun to confront you with a list of your serious shortcomings. Your first response will be to tell yourself you made a bad choice and failed to find someone truly compatible.
What if, however, you began your marriage understanding its purpose as spiritual friendship for the journey to the new creation? What if you expected marriage to be about helping each other grow out of your sins and flaws into the new self God is creating? Then you will actually be expecting the “stranger” seasons, and when you come to one you will roll up your sleeves and get to work.
What are the “tools” for this work? How can we engage one another in spiritual friendship to help us on our journey toward our future selves? How do we love each other so that our marriage goes on from strength to strength rather than stalling out in repetitive arguments that end in fruitless silence? The basic answer is that you must speak the truth in love with the power of God’s grace.
Speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.
(Ephesians 4:15)
That statement sounds platitudinous, until we break it down. As a divine institution, marriage has several inherent powers that we must accept and use—the power of truth, the power of love, and the power of grace. As we use each power in the life of our spouse, we will help him or her grow into a person who not only reflects the character of Christ but who also can love us and help us in the same way. These three powers will do their best work in us during times when we find it hard to love the semi-stranger to whom we are married.
The Power of Truth—Facing the Worst
There’s a passage in Søren Kierkegaard’s work where he likens all of us to people at a costume ball. “Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask?”3 At the time, the custom was to keep your mask on for the first part of festivities. During that time, you danced, ate, and talked with the other guests, but no one knew who anyone else was. But then at midnight all masks had to be stripped off and everyone’s true identity was revealed. In some ways, the Cinderella story is an extension of this theme, that an hour comes in which all the layers of glitter are taken away and the real, unvarnished you stands there, unfiltered for all to see. That sounds like Judgment Day, doesn’t it? But it also sounds like marriage. In marriage you can’t hide. You are exposed. You finally have your mask and finery stripped away, as it were. How so?
Marriage brings two human beings into closer contact than any other relationship can bring them. The parent-child relationship is of course very close—they live together and see one another’s character—but there is a major power differential there. The child and the parents are on such different planes that it is easy for either the parent to dismiss the child’s criticism or the child to dismiss the parent’s. Besides, it is expected that children grow up and leave.
Marriage is also a more inescapable relationship than cohabitation. When unmarried people live together, they certainly see one another “up close,” but each party knows that the other one does not have the same claims on him or her that would be true if they were married. They don’t merge their entire lives—socially, economically, legally—and so either one can walk away with relatively few complications if they don’t like what they are being told.
Marriage is different from these others. The merged life of marriage brings you into the closest, most inescapable contact with another person possible. And that means not only that you see each other close up, but that you are forced to deal with the flaws and sins of one another.
What are the flaws that your spouse will see? You may be a fearful person, with a tendency toward great anxiety. You may be a proud person, with a tendency to be opinionated and selfish. You may be an inflexible person, with a tendency to be demanding and sulky if you don’t get your way. You may be an abrasive or harsh person, who people tend to respect more than they love. You may be an undisciplined person, with a tendency to be unreliable and disorganized. You may be an oblivious person, who tends to be distracted, insensitive, and unaware of how you come across to others. You may be a perfectionist, with a tendency to be judgmental and critical of others and also to get down on yourself. You may be an impatient, irritable person, with a tendency to hold grudges or to lose your temper too often. You may be a highly independent person, who does not like to be responsible for the needs of others, who dislikes having to make joint decisions, and who most definitely hates to ask for any help yourself. You may be a person who wants far too much to be liked, and so you tend to shade the truth, you can’t keep secrets, and you work too hard to please everyone. You may be thrifty but at the same time miserly with money, too unwilling to spend it on your own needs appropriately, and ungenerous to others.
Others have seen these flaws in you. Your parents certainly have, and others that have lived with you, such as siblings or college roommates or friends, have seen them, too. But if they spoke to you about them, you could either write them off as being biased or mistaken, or you could escape from the weight of the criticism by vaguely promising to do better in the future. However, your confronters didn’t keep up their confrontations, and you haven’t really admitted the severity of the problem. The reason was that the flaw did not pose the same kind of problem for them as it will for your spouse.
But while your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage. For example, a tendency to hold grudges could be a problem within friendships, but within marriage it can kill the relationship. No one else is as inconvenienced and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is. And therefore your spouse becomes more keenly aware of what is wrong with you than anyone else ever has been.
When conducting marriage services, I like to explain this aspect of marriage using the analogy of a bridge. Think of an old bridge over a stream. Imagine that there are structural defects in the bridge that are hard to see. There may be hairline fractures that a very close inspection would reveal, but to the naked eye there is nothing wrong. But now see a ten-ton Mack truck drive onto the bridge. What will happen? The pressure from the weight of the truck will open those hairline fractures so they can be seen. The structural defects will be exposed for all to see because of the strain the truck puts on the bridge. Suddenly, you can see where all the flaws are. The truck didn’t create the weaknesses; it revealed them.
When you get married, your spouse is a big truck driving right through your heart. Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses (though you may blame your spouse for your blow-ups)—it reveals them. This is not a bad thing, though. How can you change into your “glory-self” if you assume that you’re already pretty close to perfect as it is?
When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, it was during a routine checkup. My doctor just happened to feel a tiny lump in my neck. Though the surgery and subsequent treatments were painful and frightening, at no time did the thought ever cross my mind, “Oh, I wish the doctor had never found that lump. It was so small, why couldn’t he just have missed it and spared me all this trouble!” That was because the consequences of being “spared all the trouble” would have been, in the end, far more deadly, far more trouble, than finding and treating the cancer while it was small and confined.
The first part of making your marriage into a relationship that enhances growth is to accept this inherent feature of married life. Marriage by its very nature has the “power of truth”—the power to show you the truth about who you are. People are appalled when they get sharp, far-reaching criticisms from their spouses. They immediately begin to think they married the wrong person. But you must realize that it isn’t ultimately your spouse who is exposing the sinfulness of your heart—it’s marriage itself. Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself. Marriage shows you a realistic, unflattering picture of who you are and then takes you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to pay attention to it.
This may sound discouraging, but it is really the road to liberation. Counselors will tell you that the only flaws that can enslave you are the ones that you are blind to. If you are in denial about some feature of your character, that feature will control you. But marriage blows the lid off, turns the lights on. Now there is hope. Finally you can begin dealing with the real you. Don’t resist this power that marriage has. Give your spouse the right to talk to you about what is wrong with you. Paul talks about how Jesus “washes” and “cleanses” us of stains and blemishes. Give your spouse the right to do that.
All his life, Rob had few friends. One reason for this was that since childhood, Rob had a real problem putting himself into the shoes of others. He had little or no empathy and often was surprised at people’s negative reactions to his words or deeds. When he was in fourth grade, a school counselor told his parents that he thought Rob was a “mild sociopath,” someone who often trampled on the feelings of others because he couldn’t sympathetically imagine what they were feeling. This character flaw had created problems for Rob for years, but he couldn’t see it for what it was. Few of his acquaintances ripened into friendships, and in his first jobs he regularly made missteps that infuriated both superiors and those reporting to him. He lost one job over it.
Then he met Jessica, and by the second date they both were deep into the in-love experience. She thought he was a brilliant conversationalist, and he was, and he loved the fact that she was an assertive kind of woman who didn’t easily get her feelings hurt. Several times, his sense of humor strayed into the realm of the hurtful and the insulting. This was a problem that he had had all his life, but unlike so many others, Jessica just told him off and put him in his place. He liked that! Finally a woman who wasn’t a shrinking violet.
And so they married, but as the months went by, Rob’s insensitive humor and semi-abusive remarks got worse. When we are in love, we are on our best behavior, but at home and with someone becoming more and more familiar, our natural instincts take over. We no longer catch ourselves. Soon the full extent of Rob’s problem character was there for Jessica to see in all its ugly detail. Jessica began to see how he spoke to other people, and most of them were not as resilient and thick skinned as she was. She realized the kind of relational problems that he was going to have all his life. She became deeply disillusioned with him, and, just a year after their wedding, she found herself fantasizing about being single again and free from him.
When Rob realized the depth of her unhappiness, he became alarmed, and together they sought counseling from the pastor of their church. That began a long journey. After many weeks of meetings with their pastoral counselor, they had their first breakthrough. One evening, both Rob and Jessica began to see that she had been brought into Rob’s life for this very purpose. She was a strong woman who was not fragile. She was exactly the person who could stand toe-to-toe with Rob and say, “That hurt me. I’m going to tell you exactly how it felt until you learn what your words do to people. I’m not going to clam up on you and just withdraw, and I’m not going to attack you back. I’m going to be like Jesus has been with us—accepting us in love but not allowing us to just destroy ourselves with sin.”
Rob had never had anyone love him like this. People had either just given up and withdrawn from him or had simply attacked him. Here was someone who calmly but candidly described the devastating effect of his words. And most transforming of all was the fact that the person who was telling him about his hurtfulness was the person he loved most in the world. The more Jessica loved him so nobly and well, the less he wanted to see her hurt. And so, slowly but surely, Rob began to listen, learn, and change.
Jessica herself came to see that she also had a need for radical change. “I had a fiercely independent spirit that made it hard for me to depend on anyone,” she said. “If anyone let me down, I simply dropped them. I was completely impatient with them.” When she saw the depths of Rob’s problems, she wanted to flee as she always had, but her marriage vow wouldn’t allow her to do that. For the first time in her life, she couldn’t run from a damaged person.
Three years after their wedding, Rob’s parents hardly recognized him. He was more thoughtful and empathetic than they ever thought he could be. Jessica’s parents noticed a gentleness and a graciousness toward weakness that they hadn’t seen in her before. Marriage’s “power of truth” had done its work.
“Someone Better” Is Your Spouse
We see, then, that the “power of truth” that comes with marriage is a gift, but it truly is a hard gift to receive. When you are seeing some new flaws in your spouse, or if you are always being told what is wrong with you, it takes a toll on the feelings. We are like ore right out of the mine. When you got married you saw the gold in your spouse, but as time goes on you see all the impurities. You see attitudes and personality traits and sinful habits that are going to be burned off as “dross” in the light of God’s glory over time. These flaws are not permanent. But they can loom large in your mind and create big problems, and that is hard to take.
And yet if two people learn to make the distinction between the dross and the gold, it can be a great help. Instead of saying, “That’s just the way he is, and I hate it,” remember that the part of him you hate isn’t the real, permanent him. In Romans 7:14–25, Paul speaks about this dynamic in himself: “I do the very things I hate” (7:15) and therefore “it’s not really me doing it, it’s the sin living within me” (7:20). This does not mean that Paul doesn’t take full responsibility for his actions, but he knows that the sinful actions are not from his “innermost being” where he “delights in the law of God” (7:22). Christian spouses must make the same distinction.
It will help a great deal to say, “I hate it when he does that, but that is not truly him. That is not permanent.” It will help even more to work together to agree on what is the dross and what is the gold in each other so you can say, “This is the real you, this is the real me, this is what God wants us to be, and this is what has got to go. And we’ve got to work together against it.”
I won’t minimize the disappointment of seeing the dross. When people first begin to see the flaws in their spouses, some flee the marriage. Others just withdraw, downscaling their expectations of happiness almost completely and just learn to get along. Others go into a long period of fighting and blaming their spouses for their unhappiness. All of these approaches share one thing in common, however. One spouse looks at his or her spouse’s weaknesses and says, “I need to find someone better than this.”
But the great thing about the model of Christian marriage we are presenting here is that when you envision the “someone better,” you can think of the future version of the person to whom you are already married. The someone better is the spouse you already have. God has indeed given us a desire for the perfect spouse, but you should seek it in the one to whom you’re married. Why discard this partner for someone else only to discover that person’s deep, hidden flaws? Some people with serial marriages go through the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, rejection, and flight to someone else—over and over. The only way you’re going to actually begin to see another person’s glory-self is to stick with him or her.
Many people have asked me, “How can you tell whether you’ve got a friendship on which you can base a marriage?” The answer that Kathy and I have always given is this. When you see the problems in each other, do you just want to run away, or do you find a desire to work on them together? If the second impulse is yours, then you have the makings of a marriage. Do you obsess over your partner’s external shortcomings, or can you see the beauty within, and do you want to see it increasingly released? Then move forward. The power of truth that marriage has should hold no fear for you.4
The Godly Tantrum
Before we move on from the power of truth to that of love, let me encourage readers not to shrink from really telling the truth to one another. Kathy talks of what she calls the “godly tantrum.” By this she means not an emotional loss of temper but an unrelenting insistence on being heard.
When my family moved to New York City to start Redeemer Presbyterian Church, we knew that it would be very time-consuming, especially given my tendency to overwork. From what I learned from other church planters, my life would be out of balance for about three years. That is, I’d be working longer hours than I could sustain permanently without endangering my health or my family relationships. So I asked Kathy to grant me these long hours for three years. After that, I promised, things would change. I’d cut back. OK? OK, she said.
But the three-year mark came and went, and Kathy asked me, as we agreed, to cut back on my work hours. “Just a couple more months,” I said. “I have this and that commitment that I have to see through. Just a couple of more months.” I kept saying that. The months flew by with no change.
One day I came home from work. It was a nice day outside and I noticed that the door to our apartment’s balcony was open. Just as I was taking off my jacket I heard a smashing noise coming from the balcony. In another couple of seconds I heard another one. I walked out on to the balcony and to my surprise saw Kathy sitting on the floor. She had a hammer, and next to her was a stack of our wedding china. On the ground were the shards of two smashed saucers.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She looked up and said, “You aren’t listening to me. You don’t realize that if you keep working these hours you are going to destroy this family. I don’t know how to get through to you. You aren’t seeing how serious this is. This is what you are doing.” And she brought the hammer down on the third saucer. It splintered into pieces.
I sat down trembling. I thought she had snapped. “I’m listening. I’m listening,” I said. As we talked it became clear that she was intense and laser focused, but she was not in a rage or out of control emotionally. She spoke calmly but forcefully. Her arguments were the same as they had been for months, but I realized how deluded I had been. There would never be a convenient time to cut back. I was addicted to the level of productivity I had achieved. I had to do something. She saw me listening for the first time and we hugged.
Finally I inquired, “When I first came out here I thought you were having an emotional meltdown. How did you get control of yourself so fast?”
With a grin she answered, “It was no meltdown. Do you see these three saucers I smashed?” I nodded. “I have no cups for them. The cups have broken over the years. I had three saucers to spare. I’m glad you sat down before I had to break any more!”
Give each other the right to hold one another accountable. “Exhort one another daily, lest you become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).5
The Power of Love—Renewing the Heart
Marriage has the power of truth, the ability to reveal to you who you really are, with all your flaws. How wonderful that it also has the “power of love”—an unmatched power to affirm you and heal you of the deepest wounds and hurts of your life.
You come into marriage with a self-image, an assessment of your worth. It is the sign of many verdicts passed upon you over the years by a great variety of people. Parents, siblings, boyfriends and girlfriends, teachers, and coaches have all passed judgments on you, called you good and bad, worthy and unworthy, promising and hopeless. We have sifted through them and tried to forget some, but that is hard. Statements of affirmation make a far lighter and less lasting impression upon the human heart than criticisms and condemnations. We may have been wounded by things that have been said to us—they have left an indelible impression. So there are many layers to this self-image, and many of them are contradictory. Your self-view has been stitched together often without a unifying theme. If it were made visible, it might look something like the Frankenstein monster, with many disparate parts.
However, perhaps the most damaging statements that have ever been said about us are those things we have said about ourselves to ourselves. Many people have a never-ending loop of self-talk that berates them for being foolish, stupid, a failure, a loser.
But now into your life comes someone who has the power to overturn all the accumulated verdicts that have ever been passed upon you by others or by you yourself.6 Marriage puts into your spouse’s hand a massive power to reprogram your own self-appreciation. He or she can overturn anything previously said about you, to a great degree redeeming the past. The love and affirmation of your spouse has the power to heal you of many of the deepest wounds. Why? If all the world says you are ugly, but your spouse says you are beautiful, you feel beautiful. To paraphrase a passage of Scripture, your heart may condemn you, but your spouse’s opinion is greater than your heart.
In my own life, I must confess that I had never felt “manly” until I got married. I was a nerd before it was fashionable, playing trumpet in the marching band and staying in the Boy Scouts through high school. Good things, no doubt, but not cool or macho. I was often mocked and excluded, especially during high school, for my uncoolness. But Kathy looked at me like her knight in shining armor. She has always told me, and continues to tell me, that though all the world may look at me and see Clark Kent, she knows that underneath I have on blue underwear. She has always been very quick to point out and celebrate anything I have done that is courageous. Over the years, bit by bit, it has sunk in. To my wife, I’m Superman, and it makes me feel like a man in a way nothing else could.
The same aspect of marriage that entails the power of truth also contributes to this power of love. That is, because marriage merges two lives and brings you into the closest possible contact, a positive assessment by your spouse has ultimate credibility. If someone I know a little comes up to me and says, “You are one of the kindest men I know,” I will certainly feel complimented and pleased. But how deeply will it sink in? Not too far. Why? Because a part of my heart says, “Well, nice. But he doesn’t really know me at all.” But if my wife, after years of living with me, says, “You are one of the kindest men I know,” that goes in. That affirmation is profoundly comforting. Why? Because she knows me better than anyone. And if, over the years, you have grown to love and admire your spouse more and more, then his or her praise will get more and more strengthening and healing. As Faramir says to Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.” To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world.
This principle explains why, ultimately, to know that the Lord of the universe loves you is the strongest foundation that any human being can have. A growing awareness of God’s love in Christ is the greatest reward. And yet we must not forget Adam in the garden. Though he had a perfect relationship with God, his humanity’s relational nature was designed also for human love. Your spouse’s love for you and Christ’s love work together in your life with powerful interaction.
The power of healing love in marriage is a miniature version of the same power that Jesus has with us. In Christ, God sees us as righteous, holy, and beautiful (2 Corinthians 5:21). The world tells us about our faults, and we know they are there, but God’s love for us covers our sins and continues despite them. So Jesus has the ability to overcome everything anyone has ever said about or to you. In a Christian marriage, you’re living that out in miniature. Sometimes your spouse points you directly to Jesus’s love. Sometimes you spouse’s affirmation imitates Jesus’s love and stimulates us to more fully believe and accept the love we have in Christ.
So, more than any other human relationship, marriage has a unique power to heal all hurts and convince us of our own distinctive beauty and worth.
Love Me—No, You Love Me
How do you give this life-healing love to your spouse so he or she actually feels loved? That is a very crucial subject and skill. Let me start with an illustration before I begin to lay out the principles.
In Kathy’s family, her father regularly helped her mother with the chores. He was very involved in the day-to-day domestic operations, including the care and feeding of the children. In my family, however, my father was never asked to do much in the way of chores inside the home, and in particular he wasn’t involved in clothing or feeding the kids. When we got married, we were barely aware of these differences in our family backgrounds, even though there had been one incident that should have tipped us off.
Once when I came to visit Kathy in her home, I ate dinner in the kitchen with her family. (We’d progressed beyond the “dining room and fine china” stage.) And when the meal was over I simply stood up and walked out of the room. My future mother-in-law was appalled. In Kathy’s household, everyone helped with the cleanup. At the very least, everyone was expected to take their plates and silverware and cups and any other item on the table next to their place and bring it to the sink or refrigerator. When she saw that I never even gave this a thought, she muttered something to Kathy about my wanting people to wait on me. But in my family, my mother would have been insulted if even family members—let alone a guest—helped with the dishes. That was her job—to serve and do all those menial tasks so that others did not have to do them.
This family background difference did not show itself in our marriage until the birth of our first child. I remember one day I was sitting holding David when Kathy was working in the kitchen. I noticed a funny smell and said, “Kathy, his diaper needs to be changed.”
And Kathy said, “Well you know what we say around our house, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Finders keepers!” She laughed. This meant, “Don’t look at me; I’m busy. You’ve got the child. You change his dirty diaper.”
But I found myself becoming quite angry. I felt—well, I couldn’t immediately put my finger on it. It seemed like a lack of respect. This shouldn’t be my job. When I resisted, then it was Kathy’s turn to feel annoyed. Hey, it’s just a dirty diaper. You aren’t busy and I am, she said. We didn’t resolve the issue that day, because we didn’t really understand what was going on. The care of the children in general, and smelly, poopy diapers in particular, became a bone of contention for a good while until we began to understand the underlying dynamics operating in our hearts.
Kathy’s mother had had a stroke when she was only in her forties, and her father had stepped in to do many practical household chores in a way that was atypical for our parents’ generation of working fathers and stay-at-home mothers. Her mother was deeply grateful for this and admired her husband’s love and humility. Kathy heard her mother say, “This is how my husband loves me: He helps me with the chores and children.” In my family, however, my father was never asked to do those kinds of chores. I’m not sure he ever saw the inside of a dirty diaper. He worked extremely long hours and was often very tired. My mother was grateful for his being a good provider and felt that the only way she could make an equal contribution to the family’s welfare was if she asked him to do absolutely nothing around the home. And I heard my mother say, “This is how I love your father. He works so hard. He provides for the family, so when he comes home, I don’t ask him to do those things. I take care of them.”
This difference in our families was not merely a different domestic division of labor. This was a difference in what we could call “love currency.” Kathy’s father was a man of few words; he was not verbally expressive. But he gave his wife love in the particular way that she needed it and that she knew was costly to him. It was far more valuable to her than if he had bought her flowers and jewelry. She appreciated it deeply, and it made her feel loved. My father, on the other hand, who worked such long hours, could have had a wife who complained about virtually raising the children on her own. She did not, and he appreciated it deeply and felt like a “king in his castle.”
We had observed these patterns of love currency in our respective families, and they had become part of our unconscious assumptions. And that is why we had an abiding conflict over “Who changes the diapers in this family?” It was perplexing to us at first. It seemed like a pretty simple issue. Why was there so much emotional heat around it?
Eventually we realized that when Kathy asked me to change our son’s diaper, I heard her saying that she didn’t love me, that she didn’t think I worked that hard. And when I asked her to be the one to change the diapers, she heard me saying that it was women’s work, not really important. In short, Kathy was actually saying, at a semiconscious level: “If you love me the way my father loved my mother, you would change the diaper.” And I was saying in my heart, “If you love me the way my mother loved my father, you wouldn’t even be asking me.” Each of us heard the other one saying, “I don’t love you,” because each of us was failing to get love in the particular way we felt was emotionally valuable to us.
What happened? We realized what was going on, and in that particular instance it was I who made the change, because I didn’t want to fall into a pattern of pitting my work against involvement with my children. But the lesson was one that we never forgot. It is not enough to simply say, “I love you.” Nor is it enough to give love to your spouse in the way to which you feel most accustomed. If you want to give a person $100, there are many ways to do so. You can give it in cash or by check or in gold or in kind. You can give it in different currencies. So you ask, “In which form do you want the hundred dollars?” In the same way you learn to give your spouse love in the way he or she finds most emotionally valuable and powerful. That is the only way to bring the remaking and healing power of love into your spouse’s life.7
The Currencies of Love
What we call love currencies are often called “love languages.” This metaphor is also very helpful. If we say “I love you” to someone who does not understand a word of English, then the love does not get through. We are sending it, but it is not being received. We must learn to send love in forms that the other person can comprehend. I will dare to use one more metaphor. A radio signal may be sent out on one frequency, but the radio receiver does not respond if it is tuned to another frequency. In the same way, a husband may be sending out the message “I love you” by being very sensual and romantic toward his wife, but that might not be where her love receiver is tuned. He doesn’t listen sympathetically to her when she wants to talk about the things that discourage her. She desperately wants an understanding listener, but he is impatient, usually barking out some brief advice. So she tells her husband, “I don’t feel you love me!” He retorts, “But I do love you!” Why the discrepancy? He is sending his love over a channel to which she is not tuned. This is why, so often, love is being sent in a marriage but is not received.
There are many different ways to express love. You can buy a present, say “I love you” out loud, give a compliment, be romantic and tender physically, abide by your loved one’s wishes, and spend time in focused attention. That’s just the beginning of the list. For centuries, thinkers have discerned forms of love. The Greeks had words to distinguish affection (storge), friendship (philos), erotic love (eros), and service (agape). There are other ways of breaking down expressions of love into categories. All forms of love are necessary, and none are to be ignored, but all of us find some forms of love to be more emotionally valuable to us. They are a currency that we find particularly precious, a language that delivers the message of love to our hearts with the most power. Some types of love are more thrilling and fulfilling to us when we receive them.
Why? Sometimes a particular form of love is more valuable because some significant person in your life was particularly inept at it. Sometimes a particular form of love is more valuable because some significant person in your life was particularly adept at it. Perhaps a form of love is crucial now because of your life circumstances. At any rate, some forms of love especially delight your heart. Anyone who wants to give you love needs to know what those forms are and to express his or her love in those ways.
We should do this for our spouses because God did this for us. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was told that he couldn’t see it, that it would be lethal. Yet in the gospel of John we read that God has come in human form, so that in Jesus “we beheld his glory, glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). That is amazing. God expressed his glory to us in a form we could relate to—a human form. In the incarnation, God came to us in a manner that we could grasp. So we, too, must clothe our love in the forms to which our spouse can relate. We must communicate love in the way our spouse needs it. Here are some practical principles for doing that.
First, realize you have a “filter” on. You tend to only “hear” certain kinds of love language. For example, your spouse may be working hard to provide you with material things, but you wish he were more verbal. There is a tendency to say, “He doesn’t love me!” because he is not communicating love in your most valuable language. Take off your filter and recognize the love your spouse is giving you.
Theologian R. C. Sproul once told us a story about himself and his wife, Vesta, that illustrates this principle. “What I really wanted for my birthday was something I wouldn’t buy for myself. I was hoping for new golf clubs. Vesta, a practical person, knew I needed white shirts. So she bought me six beautiful white shirts. I tried not to show my disappointment.” When it came time for Vesta’s birthday, however, he didn’t do any better. Wanting to give her something lavish and extravagant, he bought her a fur coat, not realizing that what she really wanted was a new washer and dryer. They were both trying hard to express love to each other, but they were speaking their own languages to a person who needed to hear love in a different dialect.
Consider whether some of the running conflicts you have with your spouse are not love language conflicts. That can soften your attitude and change your strategy. You could, like Kathy and I, have an intractable conflict over child-care responsibilities. But it could be that the husband is thinking (as I did), “If you love me like my mother loved my father, you’d not ask me to change diapers,” and the wife could be thinking (as Kathy did), “If you love me like my father loved my mother, you’d volunteer.” Instead of thinking about the other person, “He (she) is so selfish,” each should think, “He (she) is feeling particularly unloved.”
Learn the primary languages of your spouse and send love over those channels, not over the channels you prefer for yourself. We tend to give love through the channels in which we like to receive it.
Remember that improper love languages can be “heard in reverse.” For example, if you give material gifts to a person who wants some other form, she may say, “You are trying to buy my love!”
Never abuse the primary love language. Never withhold it to hurt the other, for the hurt will go deep. A man who greatly values getting respect from his wife in public will not be able to take it when she mocks him in front of their friends. A woman who needs lots of verbal affirmation will be devastated by the silent treatment.
Transitioning from In Love to Love
We have spoken often about how the early experience of romantic love tends to wear off and bring us back to reality. When that happens, how do we make a good transition to loving our spouse deliberately and well over the long term?
Author Gary Chapman provides an account from his marriage counseling experience that answers this question well.8
Becky came alone to see the counselor and through tears told him that her husband, Brent, was leaving. Brent later came to see the counselor at his wife’s request, but he said, “I just don’t love her anymore. I don’t want to hurt her, and I wish it were different, but I don’t have any feelings for her.” At first, Brent and Becky had been euphorically in love with each other. But in the months that followed the wedding, both had come to see one another’s flaws and the feelings cooled. In Brent’s case, the feelings of love cooled the fastest and then simply vanished. Now he said he wanted out. He admitted that he had been in love with someone else for several months. He said he could not imagine living without this new woman’s love, and he was intent on getting a divorce.
The counselor proceeded to ask him to consider a particular way to look at things. He said most marriages start with an in-love “high” during which time both partners feel profoundly loved by the very presence of the other. But eventually that high wears off and then love must become a deliberate choice. He said to Brent:
[After the euphoria wears off] if our spouse has learned to speak our primary love language, our need for love will continue to be satisfied. If, on the other hand, he or she does not speak our love language, our tank will slowly drain, and we will no longer feel loved. Meeting that need is definitely a choice. If I learn the emotional love language of my spouse and speak it frequently . . . when she comes down from the obsession of the in-love experience, she will hardly even miss it because her emotional love tank will continue to be filled. However, if I have not learned her primary love language or have chosen not to speak it, when she descends from the emotional high, she will have the natural yearnings of unmet emotional needs. After some years of living with an empty love tank, she will likely “fall in love” with someone else, and the cycle will begin again.9
Brent was unmoved. He was not convinced that his new in-love experience was the same as the one he had with Becky. This one was “the real thing,” the love that would last. He courteously thanked the counselor for his concern and asked that he do everything he could to help Becky. But he was leaving.
Several weeks later Brent called and asked for a meeting with the counselor. When he came in, he was visibly disturbed—he was not the calm and self-assured man who had come in before. He explained that his new love seemed to have turned on him. She was beginning to criticize many of the same things in his character that Becky had pointed out to him, but she was considerably more harsh and angry about it than Becky had been. It looked like the new relationship was collapsing.
The counselor restated the paradigm—at first love sweeps you up involuntarily, but eventually love is a deliberate choice. It will seem mechanical at first, he reiterated, but if both spouses do it together, eventually the experience of being loved richly and well will sweeten their lives. Brent committed himself to try, and nearly a year later he and Becky had a renewed marriage.
We should not think that this example teaches that all marriage problems can be solved by the discipline of discerning love languages and of providing love in the most fitting forms. The human heart is infinitely complex (Jeremiah 17:9). Marriage difficulties can come from deep-seated patterns of idolatry, from semiconscious anger, and from fear that needs to be rooted out with counseling and God’s grace. Nevertheless, the hard and deliberate work of knowing your spouse and loving him or her fittingly is foundational to any good marriage. Because our culture thinks of love as mainly an involuntary feeling and not a conscious action, this foundational skill is often missed entirely.
Affection
It is helpful to simply list examples of different kinds of love languages.10 Just looking at a list can begin the process of discernment. Looking over the items, a spouse may say, “If you did that for me every week, things would be different in our marriage!” And then you are on your way.
I’ll start with the category of Affection. Love can be given through eye contact, caresses, sitting closely together, and holding hands. This must not be done only when preparing for sex or it loses its integrity as a way of showing affection. Love can also be expressed through creatively finding situations that make focused attention easier. Plan walks, sitting before fireplaces, scenic drives, and picnics. Even making the effort to arrange these are an important sign and expression of love. Also, we can work on our own personal appearance as a gift to our spouse. Playfulness and fun are part of creating affectionate climates as well.
Love should be expressed verbally, not by simply saying, “Of course I love you.” We must learn to send messages of love in direct, personal, specific, and ever-fresh ways. Discern the strengths and gifts of your partner and communicate honest praise, appreciation, and thankfulness for him or her. The flip side of this form of love is refraining from harsh, critical words. Send love not just through the spoken word but through notes, cards, letters, and thoughtful reflections on special occasions, such as anniversaries.
Finally, affection can be expressed through considerate, personal, useful, and beautiful gifts.
Friendship
As we have said, friendship is essential to marriage, and this form of love has its own range of specific expressions. Friendship love can be cultivated by spending quality time together. That means doing something that at least one of you loves doing and that enables you to communicate while doing it. Most people immediately think of recreation and entertainment, and that is right, but doing common work tasks—like gardening or chores—bonds you together, too. Above all, show your spouse that time with him or her has priority in your life.
Friendship love can also be expressed through showing supportive loyalty for, as well as interest and pride in, the work world of your spouse. If both have careers outside the home, it means each learning about each other’s work and appreciating it. If the wife is at home engaged in raising children and housekeeping, it is crucial for the husband to be emotionally engaged and deeply interested in helping his wife make the house a home and a haven.
Love can additionally be expressed by sharing each others’ mental world. Reading books together (even aloud), discussing changes in one’s thinking, studying a subject together—all these are included.
Finally, friendship love is expressed and grows through both listening and opening up to the other. Friendship is above all a relationship in which it is safe to share fears, hurts, and weaknesses—an emotional refuge. Listening takes concentration. Some people are good at listening but not at opening up themselves, and vice versa. Trust is also built by following through on commitments, being reliable.
Service
Serving each other begins with the most practical and menial tasks. If the wife is largely or fully engaged in childcare and housekeeping, that may entail the husband’s participation in that work as much as possible. For example, it means happily changing diapers or helping with the house cleaning without being asked.
But serving your spouse also means showing him or her great respect. It means giving your spouse the confidence that you will always speak up and stand up for him, that you will show loyalty and appreciation for her before other family and friends.
Serving your spouse also means showing that you are committed to his or her well-being and flourishing. This kind of love is given when you seek to help your spouse develop gifts and pursue aspirations for growth.
One of the greatest expressions of love is the willingness to change, to make a commitment to change attitudes and behaviors in yourself that trouble or hurt your spouse. There must be an ability to take correction and to be accountable for real concrete changes. This kind of change is always hard, and nearly impossible without the grace of God, but it is also one of the most powerful signs of love in a marriage.
Finally, there is no greater way for Christian spouses to serve one another than to help each other grow spiritually, as we discussed in chapter 4. This means encouraging each other to participate together actively in church, in Christian community. It means reading and digesting Christian books together as well as studying the Bible together. And it means praying together. For centuries, Christian spouses have observed various forms of daily family prayer.
Praying daily with and for each other is a love language that in many ways brings the other love languages together. It means being tenderly affectionate and transparent with each other. And you hear your spouse lifting you up to God for blessing. If you do that every day, or most days, it seasons your entire relationship with the love of God and of one another.
This is by no means a definitive list of love languages or currencies. Another example might be allowing your spouse privacy, either for brief or longer periods, depending on emotional needs. There can be no excuses for shutting one’s spouse out of one’s life, but different people have different capacities and needs for time alone or outside interests. Lists like these help partners identify and articulate what is often semiconscious and hard to put into words. The task before you is difficult but simple. Learn your spouse’s love languages. Figure out together what they are, then brainstorm a handful of concrete ways to regularly give love in those forms. Then execute. Concretely give love to each other in deliberate ways every week.
The Great Problem
We have seen how marriage by its very nature has the power of truth and the power of love. The power of truth is marriage’s ability to show you who you really are. The power of love is marriage’s capacity for reprogramming your self-image, redeeming the past, and healing your deepest hurts. And now a warning is in order.
We said that if everyone else says you’re ugly, and your spouse says you’re beautiful, you feel beautiful, because your spouse’s words have that kind of power. But that means that the reverse is also true. If everyone else says you are beautiful and your spouse says you’re ugly, you will feel ugly. Your spouse’s opinion of you can be a terrible weapon. Early in your marriage you will realize what power you have to hurt your spouse. You will know his or her sensitivities like no one else. And cutting remarks from you will go deeper than any knife.
In this fallen world, marriage’s power of truth and power of love can be at loggerheads. The reason marriage has the power to show me what’s wrong with me is because my spouse sees me to the bottom in a way that even I can’t see myself. That is why her affirmation, verdict, and blessing have so much credibility and power. But here’s the problem. My wife does not learn about my sins like my physician learns about my diseases or like my counselor learns about my anger and fear. She knows my sins because they so often are committed against her. She knows I’m insensitive because I’m insensitive to her. She knows I’m selfish because I’m selfish to her.
And there’s the Great Problem of marriage. The one person in the whole world who holds your heart in her hand, whose approval and affirmation you most long for and need, is the one who is hurt more deeply by your sins than anyone else on the planet. When we are first sinned against by our spouses in a serious way, we use the power of truth. We tell our spouses what fools, what messes, what selfish pigs they are. The first few times we do it, however, we may learn to our surprise how shattering our criticism can be. Sometimes we let fly some real harsh, insulting remarks, and the next thing we know there’s nothing left of our spouses but a pair of sneakers with smoke coming out of them. What happened? Because of our spousal power of love and affirmation, when that love is withheld, the statement of the truth doesn’t help—it destroys.
When we see how devastating truth-telling in marriage can be, it can push us into the opposite error. We may then decide that our job is to just affirm. We avoid telling our spouses how disappointed we are. We shut up. We stuff and hide what we really think and feel. We exercise the power of love, but not the power of truth.
But then marriage’s enormous potential for spiritual growth is lost. If I come to realize that my spouse is not really being truthful with me, then her loving affirmations become less powerful in my life. Only when I know that my spouse regularly tells me the truth will her loving affirmations really change me.
The point is this—truth and love need to be kept together, but it is very hard. When we are hurt, we use the power of truth without love. The fury and pain of such encounters can lead to the mistake of trying to just love without telling the truth, though in the end this does not lead to anyone feeling loved at all.
What we need is the two together, intertwined. We need to feel so loved by our partners that when they criticize us, we have the security to admit our faults. Then we can come to know and face who we are and grow. That’s what should happen, but it usually doesn’t. Why not? Because when we see our spouse’s flaws we get too angry. It is extremely difficult to use the truth in a loving way, to keep truth and love together. What is the answer?
The Power of Grace—Reconciling
Truth without love ruins the oneness, and love without truth gives the illusion of unity but actually stops the journey and the growth. The solution is grace. The experience of Jesus’s grace makes it possible to practice the two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and repentance. Only if we are very good at forgiving and very good at repenting can truth and love be kept together.
Arvin Engelson, a fellow student with Kathy and me at seminary years ago, likened marriage to a gem tumbler. You put gems into the tumbler and they are brought into constructive, creative contact with each other. They knock the rough edges off of each other until each gem is smooth and beautiful. But if you don’t put a special compound into the tumbler with the gems, the stones will either bounce off of one another without any effects or may crack and shatter each other. The grinding compound in the gem tumbler is like God’s grace in a marriage. Without the power of grace, truth and love can’t be combined. Spouses either stay away from the truth—they “bounce off each other”—or else they attack one another and they shatter.
In Mark 11:25, Jesus says that if you are praying, and you realize that you have something against someone, you must forgive him or her right there. Does that mean you should not confront the person? No, you should, since Jesus in Matthew 18—as well as Paul in Galatians 6 and elsewhere—tells Christians that if someone wrongs them, they should go to the person and discuss their sin. Wait, we say. The Bible says we are supposed to forgive people and then go and confront them? Yes! The reason we are surprised by this is almost always because we confront people who have wronged us as a way of paying them back. By telling them off, we are actually getting revenge. They made us feel bad and now we are going to make them feel bad, too. But this is absolutely deadly. The person you are confronting knows you are doing payback, and he or she will either be devastated or infuriated—or both. You are not really telling the truth for their sake; you are telling it for your sake, and the fruit of that will be grief, bitterness, and despair.
Jesus gives us the solution. He says that Christians, knowing that they live only by the forgiving grace of God, must do the work of forgiving wrongdoers in their hearts and then go to confront them. If you do that, the confrontation will be so different. In other words, without the “compound”—the power of forgiving grace in your life—you will use the truth to hurt. The other person will either attack you back or withdraw. Your marriage will go either into a truth-without-love mode, with constant fighting, or a shallow love-without-truth mode, in which both partners simply avoid the underlying problems.
One of the most basic skills in marriage is the ability to tell the straight, unvarnished truth about what your spouse has done—and then, completely, unself-righteously, and joyously express forgiveness without a shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small. This does not mean you cannot express anger. In fact, if you never express anger, your truth-telling probably won’t sink in. But forgiving grace must always be present, and if it is, it will, like salt in meat, keep the anger from going bad. Then truth and love can live together because, beneath them both, you have forgiven your spouse as Christ forgave you.
What does it take to know the power of grace? First it takes humility. If you have trouble forgiving someone, it is at least partly because deep in your heart you are thinking, “I would never do anything like that!” As long as you feel superior to someone, feel like you are a much better kind of person, you will find it very hard if not impossible to forgive. If you stay superior and disdainful of the person, truth will eat up love. You will only criticize, and not in a way that the person can hear. You will be too scornful and harsh.
But speaking the truth in love requires not just emotional humility but also “emotional wealth,” a fundamental inner joy and confidence. If you are very down on yourself, if you struggle with self-loathing, then it may be far too important for you to have your spouse always pleased with you. You will not be able to bear to have your spouse upset with you at all, and that will mean you will not be able to criticize your spouse or explain how much he or she hurt you. You won’t be able to confront and forgive. You will stay resentful but will hide it, unable to be open about it. You will just affirm; you won’t confront. In this case, we have love eating up truth.
See, then, that to wield both the power of truth and the power of love in the life-changing, integrative, balanced way that they should be used, it takes deep humility and yet profound joy and confidence. Where in the world can you get that? The answer is that it must come from outside of this world. Unaided, our human nature is incapable of producing them in combination. Without an experience of God’s grace, people who feel they have succeeded in life feel confident but are not humble before others who are wrongdoers. People who feel they have largely failed in life are humble but not confident and joyful.
But the gospel transforms us so our self-understanding is no longer based on our performance in life. We are so evil and sinful and flawed that Jesus had to die for us. We were so lost that nothing less than the death of the divine Son of God could save us. But we are so loved and valued that he was willing to die for us. The Lord of the universe loved us enough to do that! So the gospel humbles us into the dust and at the very same time exalts us to the heavens. We are sinners but completely loved and accepted in Christ at the same time.
How do you get the power of grace? You can’t create this power; you can only reflect it to others if you have received it. If you see Jesus dying on the cross for others, forgiving the people who killed him, that can be just a crushing example of forgiving love that you will never be able to live up to. But if instead you see Jesus dying on the cross for you, forgiving you, putting away your sin, that changes everything. He saw your heart to the bottom but loved you to the skies. And the joy and freedom that comes from knowing that the Son of God did that for you enables you to do the same for your spouse. It gives you both the emotional humility and wealth to exercise the power of grace.
The Ultimate Power
Marriage has unique power to show us the truth of who we really are. Marriage has unique power to redeem our past and heal our self-image through love. And marriage has unique power to show us the grace of what God did for us in Jesus Christ. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells us that Jesus laid down his life for us, forgiving at great cost us to make us something beautiful. And because he has done it for us, we can do the same for others.
Our sins hurt Jesus infinitely more than your spouse’s sins hurt you. You may feel your spouse is crucifying you, but our sins really did put Jesus on the cross, yet he forgave us.
It is said that one of the old czars of Russia had a trusted general who was dying of his wounds. When the soldier was on his deathbed, the czar promised to raise the soldier’s young son and provide for him. After his death, the czar made good on his word. He gave the young boy the best of places to live and the best education. He was given a commission and entered the army. However, the young man had an addiction to gambling. Because he couldn’t cover his gambling debts, he began to embezzle from his regiment’s funds. One night he was sitting in the tent looking at the books and he realized that his embezzlement was about to be discovered. He could hide it no longer from the accountants. He sat drinking heavily as he prepared to kill himself. He had the revolver by his side and he took a few more drinks to strengthen his resolve for the suicide. But the drink was too potent and he passed out on the table.
That night the czar was doing what he often did. Disguised as a simple soldier, he was walking through the camp and the ranks, trying to assess the morale of his army, hearing what he could hear. He walked into his foster son’s tent and saw him slumped over the book. He read the book and realized what he had done and what he was about to do.
When the young man awoke hours later, to his surprise the revolver was gone. Then he saw a letter by his hand. To his shock, it was a promissory note, saying, “I, the czar, will pay the full amount from my own personal funds to make up the difference found in this book.” And it was sealed with the czar’s personal seal. The czar had seen the young man’s sin clearly, the full dimensions of what he had done. But he had covered and paid for the sin personally.
Here is why you can say to your spouse who has wronged you, “I see your sin, but I can cover it with forgiveness, because Jesus saw my sin and covered it.” It is because the Lord of the universe came into the world in disguise, in the person of Jesus Christ, and he looked into our hearts and saw the worst. And it wasn’t an abstract exercise for Jesus—our sins put him to death. When Jesus was up there, nailed to the cross, he looked down and saw us, some denying him, some betraying him, and all forsaking him. He saw our sin and covered it.
I do not know of any more powerful resource for granting forgiveness than that, and I don’t know of anything more necessary in marriage than the ability to forgive fully, freely, unpunishingly, from the heart. A deep experience of the grace of God—a knowledge that you are a sinner saved by grace—will enable the power of truth and love to work together in your marriage.
And by wielding this power in the knowledge of his grace, you are helping your spouse become something glorious.
Kathy and I have a picture of us on our wedding day on our bedroom wall. It is now thirty-seven years old. Physically, we looked a lot better then. I had hair, and, shall we say, we were a lot sleeker. When I’ve done weddings and I look at the bride and groom standing there looking fabulous in their finery, I’ve often been tempted to quip, “You look terrific, but it’s all downhill from here. You’ll never look this good again.”
But that’s not ultimately true, not if you and your spouse wield the power of truth and love with grace in each other’s lives. Not if you are committed to the adventure of spiritual companionship, to partner with God in the journey to the new creation. Then, to the eye of God, as the years go by, you are making each other more and more beautiful, like a diamond being cut and polished and set.
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our slight momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:16–18)
Spiritually discerning spouses can see a bit of what God sees in their partners, and it excites them. The rest of the world sees us wrinkling up, but using marriage’s powers in the grace of Jesus, we see each other become more and more spiritually gorgeous. We are clothing, washing, adorning each other. And someday the whole universe will see what God sees in us.
What we should say to each other on our wedding day is, “As great as you look today, someday you will stand with me before God in such beauty that it will make these clothes look like rags.”