If you didn’t want to be improved, you shouldn’t have gotten married.
Nancy (Mrs. Scott) Stanley
Intimate relationship is powerful. You can choose to be your spouse’s biggest fan and closest confidant or their harshest critic. Your relationship has the power to crush you or to re-create you both into more loving human beings. You get to choose which it will be. You can’t control your mate but you can control how you choose to respond to them. Your marriage provides you with unparalleled opportunities for personal transformation.
Usually, the impetus for our positive growth is a challenging situation. When we face difficulties we are pulled out of our comfort zone and nudged to dig deep and discover what we’re made of. Our image of ourselves as kind, reasonable, and generous is turned on its head as we see the depth of our self-interest. It is in our most intimate relationship that our real selves emerge and we are required to self-examine and adjust. Marriage provides that opportunity. It is the perfect laboratory in which to learn to love well.
It’s likely you didn’t enter your marriage relationship with a desire to change. Your partner seemed pretty perfect for you, and you felt comfortable with yourself. You enjoyed similar interests and viewpoints, for the most part, and as you looked ahead, life seemed like a smooth road. Some bumps, a few detours, but mostly navigable. Most of us don’t expect that the road ahead will involve serious potholes and mountainous climbs.
Change in marriage is a given, because it is the most trying and exposing of all our human relationships.
Most of us didn’t consider ourselves selfish until we got married. When our mate’s needs confront our own and someone’s got to give, we are faced with our own unwillingness to compromise. When our mate desires us to show affection and we don’t feel like it, we are pushed outside of our convenience. When we have to consider the well-being of another as we make life decisions, we are stretched to move beyond our self-focused concern with our own priorities.
Not only that, but our mate has a front-row seat to our shortcomings and they’re usually all too willing to point them out! When they do, we can either defend ourselves or give our mate’s observations serious consideration. We can refuse to change or take a look at ourselves and see what might need some attention. Marriage is like that—it exposes our weaknesses and helps us see ourselves in more detail. We get to choose what we do with the information, but more often than not their input is at least worthy of an honorable mention. We would do well to consider it if we want to become our best selves.
Author Gary Thomas acknowledged how his marriage had revealed his real self:
I found there was a tremendous amount of immaturity within me that my marriage directly confronted. The key was that I had to change my view of marriage. If the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy an infatuation and make me “happy,” then I’d have to get a “new” marriage every two or three years. But if I really wanted to see God transform me from the inside out, I’d need to concentrate on changing myself rather than changing my spouse. In fact, you might even say, the more difficult my spouse proved to be, the more opportunity I’d have to grow.1
This shift in focus can transform your marriage. Rather than concentrating on your needs and your mate’s faults, seeing the difficulties of your life together as an opportunity for your growth can be life-altering. Paying more attention to your own unloving ways can bring new life into your relationship. This is not easy to do. It is our natural bent to look out for ourselves and justify our own behavior.
My marriage has exposed my selfishness more than any other relationship of my life. The intimate day-to-day relating brings to light my own patterns that need changing if I am to grow as a human being. Earlier in our marriage, I had expectations I needed to surrender in order to rid myself of chronic disappointment and treat my husband more respectfully. In turn he needed to reevaluate his priority of work over family to reengage in a more balanced, loving way. The demands of marriage required both of us to change. Though painful at times, our awareness that we were in a process of becoming the people God designed us to be kept us moving forward.
In Ephesians 5:25–33 we are called to love each other in a way that will transform us. Husbands, who seem to struggle more with selfishness and lack of consideration, are exhorted to love their wives sacrificially. They are called to give themselves up for their wives just as Christ gave himself up for the church. Wives, who wrestle more with disappointment, are challenged to respect their husband. They are to esteem their husband and lift him up by affirming his adequacy. Husbands and wives are both asked to love in the way that is most difficult for them—sacrificing and respecting. That which is most difficult for us to do is what is required if we are to grow to love as Christ loves.
You are not on your own in this journey toward becoming a more loving, mature person. God has a vested interest in helping you grow. He loves you and wants to transform you from the inside out.2 And he has the power to make that happen. Ephesians 3:20 tells us God is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” He has the power to change you, your mate, and your marriage.
Do you want this kind of change for your marriage? Would you like to experience God’s help in the transformation of your heart and behaviors in a way that will breathe new life into your marriage? If this is something you desire, it can happen through a relationship with God.
The Bible tells us that God is very relational and desires to have a personal relationship with you.3 Through a relationship with him, you will experience love in its greatest form.4 This love is amazingly freeing and powerful. Through it, you can see yourself in a new light. As you grow to see and love yourself differently, you will be able to offer glimmers of this love to your mate. (If this relationship is something you desire, see appendix D.)
When you married, you may have read from the “love chapter” of the Bible:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Cor. 13:4–8)
Loving like this is a tall order. I can look back on just the past week and realize I have not loved well. As a mere human, I am unable to love like this. I need God’s love in me, changing my heart, to help me love well.
How does experiencing God’s love change you and give you freedom to love your mate in new ways? Several come to mind.
Freedom to Admit
Knowing you are loved enables you to admit your own unloving behaviors. It creates a security that allows you to look at yourself honestly. The prideful and defensive parts of you that usually keep you from wanting to acknowledge fault can calm and over time be replaced with an increased capacity to see the “plank in your own eye.”5
There is safety in discovering there is nothing you can do that would make God love you any less.6 You don’t need to hide who you truly are. God knows all about our self-centered ways and he loves us regardless. He wants us to acknowledge our unloving behavior and thoughts so that we can move past them.7 He wants us to be free to live a life of love. Admitting our shortcomings allows us to release our old ways and experience his gracious love.
Freedom from Reactivity
Knowing you are loved by the One who made you gives you a firm place to stand regardless of how your mate is treating you. Your protectors can rest assured that you are safe inside God’s love. When your spouse is being snarky because they are having a bad day, rather than seeing their behavior or remarks as a personal slight, you have more space inside to see that this is about them, not you. Their protectors are likely acting up, and you can choose to give your mate room to calm their internal struggle.
Freedom to Forgive
The verb forgive is defined in the dictionary as “to pardon an offense or an offender or to cancel or remit a debt.”8 From a Christian perspective, forgiveness is dramatically more exciting. A beautiful picture of forgiveness is found in the parable of the prodigal son, where the younger brother has wounded the heart of his father to the core by squandering his inheritance on raunchy living.9
When the young man returned home, he expected to be treated as less than a servant. Instead, his father ran out to meet him, embraced him, and lavished on him his love and a great feast. His forgiveness was far more than dutiful; it was extravagant. The story provides a picture of the abundant love God has for us, the generous nature of his forgiveness. It also invites us to become extravagant forgivers ourselves.
The concept of forgiveness can be hard to swallow. It makes sense that in the course of marriage we will need to forgive our mate over and over to move forward and enjoy a restored relationship after each fight or hurtful encounter. But being forgiven by God is a different story. You may feel you’ve led a pretty good life and, frankly, you don’t feel the need to be forgiven. By the world’s standard that may be true. But by God’s standard, all of us have rejected him at some level. We all have dismissed God to some extent and tried to live life without him. We have relied on our protectors to get us through. This is what we all need forgiveness for—ignoring him.10
His forgiveness is freeing. When I want to make my husband pay for a mean comment he made or important moment he forgot, I remember that God has forgiven me for far more and my heart is softened. I will communicate my hurt but I no longer want to extract my pound of flesh. Forgiveness is like taking a weight off, allowing us to love with a lighter heart.
Freedom from Fear
As you experience the security of God’s love for you, the fears that stir your protectors will lessen. Psalm 18:2 says, “My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield . . . my stronghold.” As you grow in awareness of his strength, you will learn to trust that he is your greatest protector. You have less need to fear as you gain confidence in his presence and provision for you.
You also worry less about your needs getting met or not having what you need in the future, as you know your future is in his caring hands.11 Knowing he’s got your back, you can live in a less anxious, more openhearted way, enjoying the present.
Fear causes us to hide and guard ourselves. As we grow in our awareness that there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love,12 we are released to be vulnerable in our relationships with our spouse and others, knowing that we are ultimately safe in our relationship with him. When our mate hurts or disappoints us, we can extend trust more quickly, realizing that human love will always disappoint in some regard. We have more realistic expectations of our spouse’s capacity to love us perfectly, and can lean into God’s unfailing love.13
If we set out to change our mate we will likely become frustrated and disappointed. It is a strange and beautiful thing that it is when we feel fully accepted and loved that change becomes possible. When we feel accepted by God, we can open ourselves to exploring our self-protective ways of being with less threat. When we bring that same acceptance to our mate, assuring them that despite their stumbling our love for them is secure, they are free to look at themselves with less defensiveness and change can begin. It is no wonder that this most exposing relationship also carries with it the seeds of the most transformational opportunity of our lives.
Discussion Questions: Chapter 11
Group and Couple Questions
For Personal Reflection