A brilliant attorney who was experiencing marital problems with his third wife once asked me, “How do you manage to stay married?”
“It’s simple,” I replied. “You just never get a divorce, and you’ll stay married.”
Clearly, he thought that I was being sarcastic, but I was completely serious. I have always maintained that the first rule in staying married is to take divorce off the table as an option.
On June 15 of this year my husband and I will celebrate our forty-ninth wedding anniversary. When you have been married as long as we have, people tend to congratulate you as if you have won the lottery or, at least, gotten lucky enough to avoid the pitfalls that cause other couples to file for divorce. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
I was only seventeen years old when I stood in that small Texas church and took my vows. Like most brides, I was happy and optimistic. I knew that life would be wonderful, and that we would love each other forever: “For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.” As I repeated those words, I had no idea how many times those vows would be tested during the course of our marriage.
As I look back on my own marriage, I believe that couples need to re-examine their vows and think about what they really mean in practical terms. I will, therefore, discuss those vows in light of what I have learned about staying married.
First, in spite of what the old song says, love will not keep us together. Love is crucial to a successful marriage, and if we look at love in light of I Corinthians, chapter 13, we will understand that it goes far beyond romantic attraction. Nevertheless, the marriage vow does not leave love hanging out on a limb like a lone apple. We vow to “to love and to cherish.” Cherish is defined as, “to hold or treat as dear; to care for tenderly, to nurture.” If our love is to last, we must cherish our mate. We must believe that our spouse is special, and that he is worthy of our love. Even when we find it difficult to hold our spouse as dear, we must believe that God has joined us to him because He holds him dear and He knows that we are the right mate for him. Then we must care for him tenderly and nurture him. We usually apply the concept of nurturing to children or young plants or animals—things that need special attention and constant care. Marriage is a joint effort to give one another the special attention and constant care that each needs to grow and to flourish so that when life is hard, we can turn to one another and find a safe place where we can grow and flourish.
During the first year of our marriage, a family friend who was a successful doctor in his mid-fifties took John and me to dinner and remarked that he “envied” us because we were just starting out. He assured us that the best time of our lives would turn out to be the years when we were struggling to succeed. He went on to say that after we reached “the top” we would find that we were lonely and disappointed.
At the time, I was certain that he only said those things because we were really struggling, and he had more money than he knew how to spend. As I look back, however, I believe that his remarks were sincere. At the time, he had two failed marriages, and he rarely saw his grown children. He had nothing more that he wanted to attain. His only interest was his medical practice, but even that did not satisfy him. Before he died in his nineties, he went on to have a total of seven marriages—all of which ended in divorce.
That brings me to my second point: We must be prepared to stay together “for better or worse, for richer or poorer.” When we recite our vows, we do not consider that it may be more difficult to stay married during the times that are “better” and “richer” than during those that are “worse” and “poorer.” In the case of the doctor, he did not divorce his first wife until he was in a successful practice and his children were grown. He had come to a point where he was no longer struggling; he had no more dreams to fulfill, and he was prepared to do something very reckless in order to make his life more exciting. At that point he simply threw his life away and hurt his wife and children in the process.
Proverbs 5:13 admonishes men to “cling to the wife of your youth”. Anyone who has been in a long-term marriage has learned that the excitement and romance of new love cannot begin to compare to the years of shared experiences, shared victories, and even shared disappointments of a life spent with the person you love. It takes a lifetime to create a marriage that can withstand the test of time.
Next week: “In sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup.
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