There was a time when almost all of the marriage advice I heard (and maybe you can relate to this) sounded really shallow - even some advice I knew had been personally useful to people. Now, some advice truly is terrible. But many years (and years of counseling) later I realized that most marriage advice and most books about marriage assume a base level of relational health. If you are really struggling with long-standing, unresolved conflict then going on more dates is not going to help. Sharing or taking turns or doing some specific couple activity is not going to help. Reading the Bible together is not going to help. And just being told to think about your spouse differently is not going to help. When you’re staring deeply into the void that separates one soul from another, when you can’t cross it and all of your efforts to do so only widen the gap, when you are lost and stuck, that is when you realize how superficial most of our ideas about marriage are.
But I don’t mean that such things are worthless, just that there is a level of stuck-ness that can cut much deeper. If that is the spot you find yourself in, you need a trusted third party to help you see things in yourself and each other that you can’t see on your own. Counseling has been really helpful for Emily and I. Done right, it hurts - because it hurts to be willing to see in yourself desires and motivations that you don’t want to see, and because it hurts to change. I remember reading somewhere that “people will change when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing”. And I hope it doesn’t always take that kind of a crisis, but I took it as an invitation to contemplate whether hanging on to my old ingrained, comfortable habits was really worth what it was costing me.
Relationships require constant vigilance, there is no safe state. “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall”, as St. Paul says. I remember when Emily and I had just graduated from 2 years of counseling, things were going really well in our relationship for the first time in years, we had both changed and grown a lot, and I thought “this is great, we’ve done a lot of really hard work, left that dark time behind, and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out”. And then a couple years ago we went through a storm and in the aftermath of that pain and hurt it felt like we lost all our progress and wound up back where we started. It was really depressing and we just looked at each other and said “wow, we suck at this. I thought we had learned to do better!”
We were better, but it was still 7 or 8 rocky months (and some more counseling, and some more looking hard at our own hearts) before we were back to relating to each other normally. And afterward we had more sobered and realistic expectations and we knew each other better. I originally thought we would be able to reach some kind of state where we had resolved all of our conflict and could just float along peacefully. But it doesn’t really work like that, life is messy and people are messy and it won’t stop being like that, but we have better tools for dealing with the mess so that it doesn’t feel quite as impossible as it did before, and we've built up a reserve of trust.
All that to say, if you’re in a relationship and feeling stuck and despairing because the sort of things that everyone says are supposed to work aren’t working, don’t be. It just means that the change needs to happen on a deeper level than most people talk about. That is the most worthwhile level anyway. You can’t do these sorts of things by direct effort - “I’m going to start respecting my spouse more”, “I’m going to stop being mad about that thing she does”. But you can make tiny decisions to open yourself up to your spouse, even in ways that make you uncomfortable. You can seek an outside perspective. You can choose to examine your heart and consider that your conclusions might be wrong, and the story you're telling yourself about your own motivations might be too (if this seems nearly impossible you're doing it right). You can bring Jesus along on the journey, because you're so screwed up that you need the help. You can give them the opportunity to respond differently than you expect them to - so much of marriage problems is in building a tidy-but-incorrect mental picture of your spouse as a stand-in for who they actually are. Real people are always surprising you.
On the other hand, if you have that base level of trust and you're not in the midst of a storm then now is a great time to put some effort into being and living together to strengthen what you have. It’s a lot easier to do now than it is to let your relationship languish on autopilot and then wake up one day to discover a huge gulf between the two of you.
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