I’ve never been good at identifying when a relationship should rightly have ended. By the time my first love and I broke up for the last time, we’d flickered on and off for years like a slowly dying fluorescent lightbulb. Not that I’m advocating for incandescent breakups. I’ve been on the receiving end of the quick pop and flash of light before darkness, and I hate that sort of surprise, that sort of pace. But the flickering is terrible in its own way. It’s annoying, and while your eyes can adjust (people can adjust to almost anything, after all), you almost inevitably end up with a pounding headache.
Part of my problem used to lie in my inability to discern the difference between “loving someone” and “being able to build a future with him.” Just as I’d grown up bearing witness to the reality of imperfect relationships that nonetheless were fruitful and full of joy and love, I wondered if each entry in my series of imperfect relationships would be the one I’d commit to over time. What are the things you’re supposed to compromise on? How do you know if it’s time to up the ante or fold?
The great fun of a relationship is the grace it can bring: the sense of having a teammate with whom you can stick it out through thick and thin. Who loves you regardless. Who loves you unconditionally. Who has seen you warts and all, and still wants to be with you.
That grace underlies the wedding vows we all know: “I take you to be mine, for better and worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” No matter what.
I attended a wedding once where some friends of the couple performed the song “Come What May,” from Moulin Rouge! Seasons may change, winter to spring / But I love you until the end of time. It was a good pick. Captures the lifelong promise, captures the grace. Whatever happens, I’ll love you.
The couple divorced.
I mention this not to pour the salt of irony in devastating wounds—I am not privy to what happened, I only know it was really difficult—but to say that despite our hopes and intentions, sometimes relationships fall apart. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote that sex should rightly happen only in relationships in which one can imagine a future, but it is so hard to know what the future will hold. Will experiences of hardship and suffering bring partners closer together or drive them apart? Will uncovered and previously unknown preferences prove to be insurmountable? Will addictions or affairs destroy trust? Staying together is hard work, even for those with incredible sexual chemistry and totally compatible personalities and similar beliefs . . . Relationships must be tended, love cultivated. In this chapter, we’ll look at the things that can aid those efforts—kindness, attentiveness, care—listen to stories of those who have ended relationships, and hear a word of hope about the power of love.
We cannot know the future, but that’s not to say that the making of promises in a marriage isn’t important. The promise to stay together, spoken in front of a gathered congregation or in a private moment, is huge. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the eminent theologian and leader in the resistance to the Nazis, once wrote, “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”1 The promise, the official entanglements and the buy-in of friends and family, provide structures and support we can lean on when things get hard.
When we are fighting, or troubled, or looking askance, we can remember the promises we made, and the memory of the courage it took to make that leap of faith can embolden us to try again, to summon up the strength to be our best selves, to make a better effort. Married couples still fight, and suffer through rough patches, after they’ve made their vows, but it’s both easier to stay together and harder to leave than before those promises are made and the legalities are finalized. Marriage is not a panacea, but it is an institution.
YET, DESPITE OUR best hopes and the strength of an ancient institution, there are some things that we might consider a bridge too far. Deal breakers. They’re different for everybody. Josh has an absolute no-smoking policy. I am incapable of falling in love with someone lacking a sense of humor. My mother has very little patience for inflexibility. My dad, a pastor, says he sees the most trouble in parishioner relationships when in-laws can’t figure out how to respect one another. My sister and her husband think it’s important to share a taste in music. They say this to me as we sit in the open kitchen of the rented beach house where we’re spending a week with our extended family; the soundtrack matters, of course, but so does the fact that we all genuinely enjoy one another.
My survey respondents, when asked about deal breakers, were less specific, and wiser, than I anticipated. Some said active addictions. Cruelty, racism, sexism, homophobia: these were other intolerable things. Nothing about the way they clip their toenails or the appropriate direction of the toilet paper roll. Most suggested that it was important to them that family and friends got along well with their partners. I asked two separate questions about the relative importance of shared interest in hobbies or activities and about the relative importance of shared political or religious beliefs. To those who hold deep religious or political convictions, it was important that those were largely shared; to those without strong religious or political convictions, it was more important that their partners share hobbies or interests. How will you spend time together if you don’t like the same things? one asked.
Interestingly, most of the religious folks weren’t particularly concerned that their partner share their religious tradition, only that they were similarly active or committed or even just open in their religious life. I know a number of clergy couples in which one spouse is Christian and the other partner is Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist. I joke that I never successfully dated a Christian, despite my cradle-to-grave religious allegiances. Josh participates in Christian life and culture, but is sort of agnostic. Religiosity was a big part of our premarital counseling: I discovered that his support of my belief and willingness to raise the kids was more important to me than his professing a personal belief in the Risen Christ; he promised to always say nice things about Jesus, but wanted to retain the right to criticize the church for its periodically garbage way of being in the world.
Sometimes holidays are actually harder in relationships where both partners practice the same religion: when you date a Muslim, you never have to fight about whose family you’re going to celebrate Christmas with. The rules, such as they are, for making a relationship work across religious difference are pretty much the same as making any relationship work: mutual respect of the partner’s right to be different from you.
As we saw in chapter four, the worst part about being single, my survey respondents said, was the loneliness. One need not be single to experience loneliness, however. It’s entirely possible to be lonely in a relationship, and that’s probably a good sign that this pairing needs to either change or end.
PSYCHOLOGIST JOHN GOTTMAN has studied couples for years, bringing them into his “Love Lab” (which only sounds skeezy) to be interviewed. While they’re interviewed, various physiological responses are monitored and measured. After years of research, Gottman suggested that there are two types of couples, those he calls the “masters” and the “disasters.” The masters were happily together after years; the disasters had decided either to split or to live in misery. The physiology of each group differed drastically.
Emily Esfahani Smith, telling the story in The Atlantic, writes:
The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.
But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal—of being in fight-or-flight mode—in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger. Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other.2
The “masters,” on the other hand, were physiologically at rest. Their bodies reflected that their relationships were havens of comfort, trust, and intimacy.
A haven is not a cave. Some introverted couples love just holing up together, while extroverted couples may need to be out in the world together. A haven of intimacy can travel. But how do you go about getting a haven?
Knowing what intimacy is and what intimate interactions look like constitutes a good start. Domeena Renshaw, now retired founding director of the Loyola Sex Therapy Clinic in Chicago, defines it in her supremely interesting volume Seven Weeks to Better Sex as “a closeness of your minds, your emotions, and your beliefs.”3
Closeness, of course, doesn’t look the same to everyone: I like to cuddle and pile and touch, basically constantly. I have not much in the way of personal space when it comes to loved ones. I am lucky that my beloved spouse is touchy-feely. My friend dated a guy who was content to come spend the night without anything sexual transpiring—he’d just spend the night in her bed—and she loved that. But she’d usually have her fill of the super-close cuddling after about three minutes and then have to come up with a kind and loving way to tell him to scoot over.
Intimate interaction isn’t, then, just about a particular sort of closeness. Renshaw describes those interactions as “the seven Rs”: respect, risk-taking, responsibility, rights, regard, reciprocity, and response.4 Respect the other’s needs and desires; take risks to try something new or say hard things, regardless of the consequences (how terrifying can it be to be the first to say “I love you”?); take responsibility for the health of the relationship—both have to invest fully; honor the other’s right to things like privacy and honesty; assume the worth of the partner and take an interest in his or her well-being; be fair—he shouldn’t get to go out drinking with his friends and then gripe when she wants to go hang with hers; and finally, respond to each other thoughtfully, and when asked.5
The response one colored my friend’s dilemma with the wonderful cuddling guy. She didn’t want to tell him to shove off. She needed some more inches in the bed, but she loved him and didn’t want him to feel hurt.
Gottman’s research on the masters and the disasters reflects wisdom similar to that in Renshaw’s work. In the early nineties, Gottman created a retreat for 130 couples and observed them on this “vacation” as they ate, hung out, and relaxed. Over the course of the day, he charted how many times one partner would make a “bid” for connection. The bid could be about anything. Hey, look at this cool bird! Listen to this neat thing I’m reading. The number of bids made was telling—how much did the couple want to connect, even in little ways, with each other? The partner’s response was another significant source of information. Did she respond with interest, “turning toward” her partner and connecting with him? Did he basically ignore her, “turning away”? Was she rude or hostile—Can’t you see I’m trying to read?—slamming the door on intimacy?
Couples that didn’t make it had a lot fewer bids, and a lot fewer connections. The happy couples bid more and responded more. They were connected, meeting each other’s emotional needs.
A relationship that’s worth being in, the kind that doesn’t leave you feeling more lonely than you were when you were single, but creates a sense of peace and even joy, is built on these interactions. Relationships thrive or perish based on how we connect with one another. The “masters of love” in Gottman’s work are kind to each other. They do not express contempt, nor foster it. They are generous, not hostile or critical.
Though Josh isn’t a Christian, when he and I started dating, I recognized in him a manifestation of the gospel—of trust and hope and forgiveness, of the abundance of love. He wasn’t afraid of being nice to me—that I might read too much into it; he didn’t see our relationship as a vying for power, or a competition.
There’s a story in all four Gospels (that’s rare, that a story appears in all four) in which Jesus has been teaching a crowd of people and it comes time to eat and they’re all hungry and there’s really nothing to eat. This is a crowd in the range of five thousand, too, not like twenty for a daylong conference. The disciples tell Jesus that the people are getting restless, and ask him what they should do. He instructs them to go around and ask everybody what they’ve got to share, and to see how much they get. So the disciples go around and ask everybody, and apparently no one assumed this teaching would go that long, because when they return to Jesus all they’ve collected is five loaves of bread and two fish. This is clearly not enough to feed everybody, even if the people are only getting Communion-size chunks and the disciples plan to serve the whole fish, bones and all.
Jesus prays over the food regardless and sends the disciples out to distribute it. Miraculously, there is enough. More than enough. Somehow, there are leftovers.
I love this story. I love it because whether “God provides the increase,” or whether the people felt inspired to cough up more than they’d initially offered to the kitty, this is a story about how trust and faith lead to abundance. We’re all in this together, and when we come together, there’s usually enough.
Masters of love know there’s no danger of a love shortfall. Love begets love. Kindness leads to kindness. Trust demonstrated strengthens trust all around.
I WANTED TO be with Josh because (among 2,700 other reasons) he saw us right away as a team. Not a team against the world—not as Romeo and Juliet, who, romantic as they are, you’ll recall, end up dead in the near term—just a team: in this together.
We’ve all known couples we knew weren’t going to make it; some of us have even been a part of that kind of couple. He talks to her terribly; she berates his interests.
People are different. We’re all different; we’re all strangers to one another. But how we respond to difference, how we treat strangers and those dear to us, makes all the difference. Are we stingy with praise? Are we lousy at sharing? Josh loves—loves—fantasy football. He is commissioner of his league. He and our daughters speak longingly of the day, hopefully before the fulfillment of time, on which the league trophy will return to our home. Our daughters, in fact, referred to football as “Go, go, go!!!” in their early years, because their father routinely jumps out of his seat to wave his arms at “his” players and shout at them.
I do not quite understand this.
I am not athletic. I am not particularly competitive. I make, as you can imagine, a terrible sports fan. For my husband, Sundays from September through January or February are for football. He will come to church if I am preaching and he can record the games; he prefers to attend my dad’s church during the season because it is closer to our home and they get done sooner.
For me, Sundays are for church and napping and family dinner.
I will not tell you that this difference has never been an issue for us. Soon after we started dating, Josh and his friends held their draft and after-party on my birthday. But we’ve figured out, over time, how to cross the chasm of our interests. Josh usually doesn’t prioritize football over our family’s needs: the girls have jerseys and watch with him. He, though an active viewer of televised games, is never rude or profane or overtly angry in their presence.
I don’t get how he can spend hours each week watching football, how he can get so worked up about something that is supposed to be relaxing, that is, in the grand scheme of things, so inconsequential.
To be fair, he doesn’t understand how I can get just as absorbed by a terrible book as a good one, or work on friendships and collegial relationships with people who annoy him.
Josh hasn’t spent all day and night watching football and ignoring his family in forever. I haven’t read a crappy novel instead of receiving one of his bids for connection in a while, either.
I once dated a guy who, while losing at a drinking game, punched a hole in a wall. I was shocked. He was a totally great guy, but that kind of anger—wherever it was coming from, and whatever it was really about—scared me. That was the beginning of the end of us, I think. I know that sometimes people are jerks about one thing, and that their poor behavior doesn’t necessarily carry into other things. But I don’t believe that with any conviction, not really. If someone is mean, it’s only a matter of time before she’s mean to you. If someone cheats to be with you, he’ll probably cheat on you. Jesus says, “Whoever is faithful with little is also faithful with much, and the one who is dishonest with little is also dishonest with much” (Luke 16:10, CEB). Whoever gets that mad about a beer game will probably get mad over equally inconsequential things over time. I didn’t think he’d ever hit me, but I wasn’t overly inspired to stick around and find out.
That’s not to say that people can’t change. The “masters of love” in Gottman’s work saw kindness as a muscle, one that strengthened with practice. We can learn to be more honest, more kind, more gracious. We can, in John Wesley’s language, grow more perfect in love. With God’s grace, we can do all things; nothing is impossible with God.
The promises we make to each other—either in weddings or well before—can be kept. There are tons of happy unions. Extended monogamy, contrary to what the armchair evolutionary biologists suggest, is totally possible and can be wildly fulfilling. But, as Renshaw suggests, both partners have to be all in.
My last serious relationship before Josh ended somewhat unilaterally; we were starting to look to the future together, and I realized—the way you know in the pit of your stomach—that I didn’t want to be with him anymore. It wasn’t anything about him. He was great. But I wasn’t all in, and I didn’t think I ever would be.
THERE’S GREAT DEBATE, wailing and gnashing of teeth, over the Disneyfication of our culture’s ideas about love. You could draw it back to any number of sources, but I see it most clearly in the 1959 feature film Sleeping Beauty. After Maleficent casts her terrible spell and disappears with a cackle, Merryweather tries to soften the blow. Not in death but just in sleep the fateful prophesy you’ll keep . . . when true love’s kiss the spell shall break. Then the chorus sings: For true love conquers all.
Love is all you need, the Beatles sang not long after that.
We, the wizened, may not always believe that. We’ve been hurt. Those sentiments are for pop songs and children. But for Christians, our critique ignores the roots of these convictions in our own funny culture, in our own scriptures. It’s rendered this way in 1 John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (4:18). The Song of Songs proclaims, “for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave” (8:6). It’s in Romans like this:
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(8:37–39)
Come what may . . . true love conquers all . . .
Love is of God. I believe that. Love is one of the primary ways that we know God, that we recognize God. And love can empower us to do more than we ever thought possible: to work for healing, for better ways of living and being in relationship.
People, though, not being God, need not only love but also the practices—or the skills—of loving well. To move the motivation to reconcile or change into action. Writer Ann Patchett, in the titular essay of her recent collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, describes the “unmitigated disaster”6 of her first marriage. “Oddly, what I fell back on during that time were the lessons of my high school home economics classes. I decided I would maintain stability through food preparation. . . . We drank huge quantities of milk.”7
She was going to fix him, make him just how she wanted him. But he resented her, did not treasure her efforts or who she was. She could find no exits, could not see that “the world wouldn’t end were I to pack up and leave.”8
Finally, she found a way out. She had an affair. She seeks no absolution; things got worse, much worse, before they got better. In the middle of that, she meets a woman who has recently divorced. This woman asks her:
“Does your husband make you a better person? . . . Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer? . . . Does he make you better?”
“That’s not the question,” I said. “It’s so much more complicated than that.”
“It’s not more complicated than that,” she said.
“That’s all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?”9
When Ann eventually leaves her husband, she calls her mother, who says, “What took you so long?” Everyone could see it but Ann and her husband.
Not everyone leaves. Some people stay and make each other miserable for years. All things being equal, I think God would prefer that those couples find healing as individuals that would allow them to reconcile as pairs. God wants us to honor our commitments. God wants us to hope for change. But sometimes we are unable to work with God in the context of a given relationship. Sometimes one of us is, but our partner isn’t. Sometimes a partner won’t take responsibility for his or her role in a relationship.
A few years ago, there was another article in The Atlantic that made a bit of a splash. “Marry Him!” Lori Gottlieb instructed women. The question stands before every woman over thirty-five: “Is it better to be alone, or to settle?”
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)10
Gottlieb writes as a single mother—a woman who wanted to be a mother and went ahead and had a baby despite never having found Mr. Right. There are things she’s right about: if you want a family, and you want a marriage, you will be well served by reminding yourself that nobody’s perfect. My husband likes beef jerky. I have seen him eat something called a “pickled sausage” that he purchased at a gas station. He, the poor man, has to live with someone who is right about everything, all the time, at least in her own humble opinion. I also have both failed to lose all the baby weight after our third child and steadfastly refuse to reduce my sugar or alcohol intake, much less take up running. (I hate running.)
Nobody’s perfect. But we try to be kind to each other. I try to be nice when his gas station purchase wreaks digestive havoc. He signs me up with Fitbit and MyFitnessPal and cooks healthy recipes for dinner, because he loves me and does not want me to develop diabetes. He also does not gloat about his much higher metabolism.
Gottlieb’s wrong about settling, though. Imperfect people can have successful, intimate relationships, but no matter how perfect two people seem to be for each other, if they’re not both all in, it’ll never work. The state of being fully committed to a relationship is synonymous with actually doing the work of being in a relationship. A couple I know does not want to split, but he gets mad whenever asked to care for their children, speaks harshly to her, and flirts with others. He’s still there, but he’s not living into the commitment they made to each other.
When a relationship ends, especially one that’s lasted awhile and been intimate, one that’s had good times as well as bad, there’s bound to be grief. But grief doesn’t always mean the decision was a bad one. Leaving someone who doesn’t love you or who hurts you or even someone you can’t commit to for one reason or another is fraught, but sometimes it’s necessary.
At the same time, I am amazed—profoundly grateful and amazed—by stories of couples who have made their relationships last through thick and thin, through sickness and health, through richer and poorer. Lost jobs, grad school stress, cross-country moves, illness, poverty, mental illness, recovery, terrible bosses, infidelity both physical and emotional, feuding families. People make it work all the time.
It’s kind of a miracle, and I’m not always sure how it works. But, like the loaves and the fishes, I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that the important things in life are ours in abundance, and can never run short: kindness, trust, love, and generosity are the gifts that keep on giving. Christians can and should claim this truth. We love, because God first loved us.
If you share your love with someone who cannot or does not reciprocate, it’s over.
But if you share your love in risk and trust, and that person loves you back with hope and kindness, you’re well on your way. After all, the poet writes, “Many waters cannot quench love / neither can floods drown it” (Song of Songs 8:7).