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Our world is very confused about how to have healthy relationships and thus healthy marriages. Confusion is indicative of ignorance and many of our so-called psychological experts share this ignorance. This confusion believes it’s a good thing to unhitch oneself from traditional values and behaviors. However, the effect of ignorance of the biblical blueprint for marriage is like an Uber driver without a navigation system. This series will orient us toward True North, but we must trust the GPS, even if it seems to be taking us on an unfamiliar route.

After hours of research, counseling, and coaching, my conclusion is that modern people view marriage as the end of a journey and not the beginning of one. The age at which people marry is now decades later. People are seeking to “establish themselves” financially or within their careers, or pay off debts, or obtain some sense of self sufficiency before marriage. Our culture’s low view of marriage has scared young people with its 50% divorce rate, and convinced them that waiting helps a person to “make sure” they don’t marry the wrong person. We’re told to have fun while we’re young, and wait till much later to get serious with someone. The problem is that waiting doesn’t help us “make sure,” it makes us less sure. Marriage is seen as negative or as being “strapped down.” Only 1 in 10 young people think marriage is vital to a happy life.

These perspectives are not a recipe for successful marriages… they are divorce practice.

Marriage cannot be separated from a discussion about feminism and gender roles. Feminism has liberated women from the economic necessity of marriage and that has been positive. Women today are equally empowered financially, and as a result they file 69% of the divorces. Women who seek self definition outside of the home now share in the same delusion as men, namely, becoming an established, independent person is not what makes someone ready to be married. Men have known this for years, now women are realizing it too as their relationships fall apart.

Take a minute to process this.

On the surface, deferring marriage until a person is old enough to know who they are seems like sound advice, but it turns out to be false. Neither time, nor establishing ourself can tell us who we are. Only our Maker can say WHO we ARE. The dating world obsesses with identities surrounding achievement, status, and external displays. Putting on a “good show” is how the players play. Modern dating is the process of peacocking until we “get to know” the real person behind the mask. Add to this the fact that sex often precedes dating, and this illusion of intimacy only adds a dissociated sense of shame or conquest to our inability to know ourselves and ability to be known. Thus the hook up culture is not an advancement for sexual freedom, nor self definition, but is the prison where the unknown soul seeks to validate what it knows is broken within itself.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20)

It is impossible for two pseudonyms to experience a marriage. Marriages between what’s false don’t exist. Our false-self turns the marriage’s problems into the spouses deficiencies. Financial problems, our spouse getting out of shape,…the in-laws, or if our spouse wasn’t reactive, emotionally unavailable, insecure, addicted, a spender, clingy, etc are all the “other person’s” problems. There is no “other” person in a marriage. Ephesians 5:28 says: “In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”

We can pay a psychologist thousands of dollars and hours in their chair reflecting about childhood traumas, getting diagnosed, label our spouse a histrionic or a narcissist or any other thing in the DSM-5, but this is just kicking the can down the road. The true love and intimacy we all desperately seek can only be received if it is first given. Thus we must break free from getting sucked into our own offenses, a give our spouses the pass we would give ourselves. Do this enough times, and there will never be a secret between you. Therapy doesn’t act this way…love does.

Love is a skill. A decision.

We can begin experiencing a marriage within five minutes. Marriage is the byproduct of the false-self dying. Marriage begins when we are single, not when we “establish our life“, but when we are willing to “lay down our life.”

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…”   (Ephesians 5:25)

The world trains us to live our lives focused on ourselves, our wants, our needs, our fulfillment. This is not knowing ourself, and dating from this framework is divorce practice because it trains us to compete and negotiate for what we want out of the relationship. This is a transaction whereas a marriage is transformation. We must train our kids to practice self-sacrifice, not selfishness in dating. Dating is the practicing vulnerability. It’s learning how to place our heads in a guillotine and give away the rope. The world enjoys taking off their clothes, but it thinks true nakedness (vulnerability) is risky. Love doesn’t do this. Love doesn’t compete. Love doesn’t need to negotiate. It divests.

Marriages are filled by emptying. 

If you are seeking to find a true love, and build a lasting marriage, learn how to empty yourself and give yourself away is how we create the “marriage.” This “high view of marriage” might seem impossible. It might seem like no one is capable or willing, but that’s because it’s foreign even among those who should know better. Like I said, people are ignorant about how to have healthy relationships. Dating is where we learn how to empty increasingly more within the warp and weft of life, not plunder the other.

Joining oneself legally to a high view of love is not scary or risky. Both are filled by the emptying of the other, losing themselves in exchange for the shared married identity. Sex from within this kind of marriage is the best sex people can have because it isn’t limited to two bodies who are extracting pleasure from each other, but are two entire lives, giving themselves to becoming one flesh. That’s a high view of sex and it’s worth waiting for. It’s what the world seeks but will never find. To quote my friend: “Sex is 10% of a good marriage and 90% of a bad one.” In a self-giving, loving relationship, sex has no weirdness, insecurities, shame, guilt, risk, or corruption. It’s unashamed and beautiful by design.

High view of love…high view of marriage…high view of sex. We must stretch and grow to obtain them.

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”        (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

Our world says “Love is not enough for a marriage.” That’s not true. Yes, practically speaking, there are logistics in life beyond the relationship. However, a true marriage grows on sacrificial love. As you can see from the text above, love is not an emotion, it is an act of the will. Love is an action verb not a feeling. Love is when a person has the self-awareness to catch him or herself in the act of being unloving, and then wills that unloving part to die for the sake of the other.

If you are legally bonded to a person with whom you are not truly married. Share this post and start a discussion to see if they understand it and would consider this approach. It will take two self emptiers for the dynamic flow of love to be fully experienced. The barrier for most couples will be trust and on this I have something to say. We cannot love someone we do not trust. Contrary to the ignorance of the world, Trust (just like love) is built within us as an act of the will, not on another’s performance. Trust isn’t earned, it’s graced. Better to just give our trust away. Yes, we may get trampled on, rejected, refused, misunderstood, maligned, or any number of horrible forms of abuse, but you will be “in love.” And you can know you are in love, because your experience mirrors that of Christ.

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)

Do you see how the biblical blueprint isn’t so much a rule for us to obey as it is a principle that inspires our heart onward to new depths? If the world could see more relationships like this, few of us would choose the foolishness of world, and we could avoid the pain that our delusions about love and marriage produce.