Dear Wife, You Are More Than a Marriage
They said “marriage is a mirror.”
That the state of ones marriage is a reflection of God’s love and engagement and you will know your devotion to Him by your dedication to your marriage.
They told you we discern God’s blessings on people based on how well their marriage is doing. And they meant the outward show, not the depth-of-your-bones reality.
It is true that a real authentic relationship with God leads to better values. Those better values can lead to healthier marriages when both people are honoring and committed to growth.
But when in a troubled harmful marriage, “you’ll know your devotion to God by your dedication to marriage”, works out to honoring the first part of the statement.
You steady blistered hands and gather the flaming pieces of your marriage because the legitimacy of your faith has been tied to the survival of your marriage. The perpetrator grabs the pass and continues basking in the “witness” of an “intact” marriage.
Friend, they – your pastor, church community, friends, family and all who are not compassionate witnesses to your pain – failed to tell you that marriage is not a meter for anything, let alone for Divine attunement and engagement.
They failed to tell you that a spouse can be blessed right out1 of a marriage when staying means the death of their body, soul, and life.
Your Marriage is Not a Mirror: God cares about you, a person
Not the stuff you do or the places you inhabit. If there’s a sequence, you, the human being, made in the Image of God, is first.
And you have the freedom to dislodge from your brain and heart those who say you are less and by their words and behavior, expect you to stay in desolation with no sensible, safe way out. See How Do You Convince Your Loved One that Getting Away From Your Abuser was the Right Thing to Do?
Your Marriage is Not a Mirror: You can’t fix something that’s not yours to fix
The person with the problem fixes the problem.
Borrowed responsibility is borrowed trouble. You’re always trying to fix something that someone else is always breaking and refusing to fix. They knock down their life and your connection to it, and you keep trying to repair and heal it for them. Over and over and over again.
They hand you their problems instead of taking responsibility for them. And expect you to fix them for them.
Look, even in healthy marriages, spouses manage and nurture their individual parts. A healthy marriage requires we figure out healthy individuality and how not to pile things on the relationship that belong to the individual.
Individual responsibility is normal everywhere. (Perhaps you too can come up with one or two relationships in your life where you shy away from carrying someone’s personal bags. Think about your neighbor: how you don’t tell them how to parent their four year old, or what to cook for dinner or what jobs to take. They mind their life and you mind yours. It’s no different in marriage. We mind our individual spaces.)
Your Marriage is Not a Mirror: You are more than marriage
You are human. With needs, desires, emotions, limitations, hopes, and dreams, and a God-given RIGHT to honor and protect those.
It’s impossible to build a safe structure out of hot flying ash. The offender – the one searing, deceiving, abandoning, exploiting – has to be willing to own their parts and get themselves together (seek help) if they want to be healthily related to.
You can’t make up for what they lack or love their ashes to life. You can try, but it’ll break you.
Your spouse needs to want the health and accountability and growth and peace for themselves. He has to not just want it but do the work. (If he does the work – if he ever does – you are not obligated to stay.) Also See A Letter on Showing Repentance
You deserve a peaceful, nurturing life
You deserve to walk out of your front door and feel the wind on your skin and smile at a pleasant memory and remember if you ate lunch. You deserve a life and relationship that is not draining the life and sanity out of you.
They taught you the prosperity-gospel-marriage, where God’s goodness is measured by material things.
They worshiped marriage and had everyone believing our identity was wrapped up in marriage so that marriage-at-any-cost was seen as faithful belonging.
But they lied. Faithfulness to Christ and His values doesn’t just lead to healthier relationships between two honoring spouses.
It also leads to detaching when environments and people are oppressive and harming. Christ leads His people to peace and safety wherever peace and safety are found.
They lied when they said you can discern God’s blessing on individuals based on how well their relationship is doing. Because A), Belonging, God’s presence and delight isn’t something we buy, earn or conjure into existence via who we share a bed with.
It just is. We come out, and there’s a Divine Parent. Like a newborn who knows not who, where, or how they ended up here, but deep down in their soul, there is a little map that curves towards nurturing love.
B) Because of A) we can, outwardly, appear any sort of way – shattered or mended, impoverished or wealthy, angry or easygoing, grieving or happy, humanly abandoned or supported – and our state has no bearing on whether or how we belong. We already Belonged. See Of “Testimonies”, Bewildering Hallelujahs and the Christian Reluctance to Sit with Hard Stories
Friend, God Gets It
We people of faith love to talk about how God created marriage. How God is love.
Well then. We can tease out that the purpose of marriage is not to slowly melt our brains and break us apart. The destruction of our lives by another person through covert or overt abuse is not something God ordered. He is love.
Marriage is meant to be a good thing, not a disease that eats us alive.
If a spouse is a wrecking ball, the chronic disease devouring your life, you have power to get a lay of the land, lean into your intuition, the compassionate encouragement of those who actually care about your wellness, professional resources available to you (lots of free online starting points and communities, click here for suggestions) so you can gather up some clarity and courage for your next step.
Remember: you are the boss of your own life. Your marriage is not your boss. Those who think God will be mad at you if you prioritize your peace and safety are not your boss. Your pastor is not your boss. Your spouse is not your boss. You are. God created you and made you the lead. You are the captain of your life.
Your Marriage is Not a Mirror: For Those in the “But Everyone Struggles” Back Section
This part might also be helpful in processing the harm being done to you.
In the past, I’ve been told that my view of marriage is an impossible standard that no spouse can meet. Which was their way of saying destructive patterns are standard issue with marriage, and we should all just pipe down and accept it.
Again, not reality.
I’m certainly not interested in quiet when my liver is screaming in pain. I’m not about to keep it moving when my knee is out of joint and in need of emergency care. I’m not even interested in letting go when my little finger scraps.
And I’m speaking metaphorically. How in Christ, we are all one and if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, we all rejoice together.1 Corinthians 12. When the body of Christ – my siblings – is hurting, I’ll be a witness.
Healthy or not?
There’s a difference between someone who carries within themselves a sense of right and wrong, of fairness and responsibility and someone who operates from a baseline of wounding, on a character level. See 18 Things Normal Guys Don’t Do in Marriage (And 12 Things They Pursue)
People with normal-range human issues are open to receiving feedback. They can reflect and take responsibility. They wrestle with truth being presented Vs. automatically sending it back to where it came from. They repent, and that fruit of repentance is visible long term.
Healthy folks are still human, with human-type limitations and blind spots. They still need to grow, still need to address things in their lives. Still need to learn how to do relationships well. But. An allowance for humanness isn’t the same as harming without repentance.
So, for example, if you’re snappy and irritated and are made aware of how you made someone feel, you own it, and you apologize. (Even if no one brought it up, you own your feelings and actions and space and seek to do better.) The “struggle of human” still owns up to its responsibilities.
“Human mistakes” don’t 1) keep repeating themselves 2) harm others. When they do, they are not “human mistakes.” And they should not be enabled, tolerated, explained away, or minimized.
A pattern of unrepentance, an entitlement to do things their way, no matter who gets hurt and with no consequences, is a mark of one who is unhealthy and unsafe. Not someone with normal human struggles.
You Can’t Fix a Bad Marriage by Yourself.
Sometimes, the problem is that one partner absorbs all the responsibilities of relating while the other “enjoys” the benefits. The gap between what happens to us in relationships and how we are taught to respond is why I wrote Courage: Reflections and Liberation for Hurting Soul book. You deserve better. Get Courage on AMAZON I PDF
FOOTNOTES:
1. Escaping a harmful marriage is not always within reach for many. See “But Why Doesn’t She Just Leave Him?” 40 Reasons Women Stay in Destructive Marriages Whether she stays or leaves, God is with her. She knows best. She gets to decide. The point I’m making is that escaping a harmful marriage is not the curse people made it out to be.
Thank you for such an insightful and encouraging piece. I appreciate it so much. I am walking away from a 28 year marriage this next week. I believe the lies and misinformation. I am learning that I am worthy, and that my health is more important to God than my marriage.
I’m so glad it was encouraging to you in this season. Yes, YOU are worthy and YOU matter to God than your marriage.