I Love My Marriage, He Has A Great Personality!

Coming up soon is my Engagement Anniversary. Most people don’t celebrate their engagement anniversary, but most peoples engagements do not last over a year. We celebrated the first one in 2006, and decided to take this time, each year, to stop. We take time to enjoy being with one another, then assess our marriage. We honestly ask, what can I do better to serve my partner? What can I do to help grow our marriage? It should be no suprise then, that this time of year gets me thinking about relationships.

Relationships, and particularly marriages today confuse me. Many people are afraid of being alone. They know that they are wired for companionship, but once they get it they take it for granted, or they can’t see the companionship, they just see all the responsibilities that go with it. My wife and I did around three or four different pre-marital counseling programs with a variety of pastors, not because there were deep seated issues from our past that would haunt us through the years (don’t get me wrong, we have our share of baggage) but because I love her, she loves me, and in our love, the relationship itself seems to have a personality.

Our relationship is fun, and easy going. It is introverted, and sweet. Our relationship is kind and sacrificial and loving to each of us. As odd as this comes out, I don’t just love my wife, I love our relationship. This drove me to marriage counseling because, like a child, I wanted to do what was best for this relationship, I wanted to be trained on how to care for and feed a relationship. Furthermore, it actually turned into a lot of fun because in marriage counseling you spend the whole time talking about your relationship! It’s like a forum where they invite you in and say, “Tell me about your baby.” Find me a parent that doesn’t want to talk about their baby! They give you the strangest stuff! “Today little Johnny threw up all over my shirt, it was so cute!” So it was kind of the same way for me. We got to talk about our relationship, tell how cute he is, and all the neat stuff he does, and how I don’t really expect anything specific out of him. I just want him to be good, and Christian, and grow up great. Today, our relationship has grown into a wonderful marriage and I am very proud of him.

I love my marriage, I love my wife, and I found one really huge thing out during marriage counseling: Most people don’t. They don’t love their relationship, they never even though what he was like! Their relationship has no personality (or if it does, they don’t care what it is like) They kind of treat marriage as the song says “two paychecks are better than one, a diamond ring, and it was done.” As though marriage were a series of tax write offs rather than a relationship.

The majority of the training I got in premarital counseling was like what you’d find in a class on parenting entitled ‘How to keep a kid alive’ They say “Feed it, change its diaper, and when it’s sick take it to the doctor, and don’t drop it, don’t throw it, and don’t leave it in the tub unattended, try to use some common sense!” As though that’s all that there is. Ask any mom, it’s not! However, if you quit there, you will be lucky if your kid survives. Its like the combat manual version of raising your relationship.

No wonder we have a divorce rate of over 50%! People are killing their relationships because they fail to have even the basics of feeding watering and changing the diaper! Then there’s the dating scene which is totally sick! It’s the relationship equivalent of a slave market! People show up, usually put money down in exchange for a relationship, and expect it to do whatever they say, and when it doesn’t, when it just starts to get a mind of its own, they kill it and go back to the market for another one. “What’s a girl like you doing in a bar like this?” isn’t a pickup line, it’s a bid in a slave auction. It’s really “Can I have this relationship for a few drinks and some fake kind words?” (notice how they are fake, not pretend, these folks aren’t even getting ready to be kind, they use counterfeit kindness, like counterfeit bills, it shares a resemblance but it’s not worth crap!)

I am so thankful for my marriage, that I have a marriage that I can be proud of, one that is growing and is exactly what God made it to be. If I can be as fortunate with my children, I’ll be the luckiest man in the world!

If you want to grow your relationship or marriage past the battlefield manual of survival, maybe you should start treating your relationship like a person, find out what he’s like, and then figure out what you can do to help him out, instead of just asking what he can do for you!

Finally, I’m utterly convinced that just like a person, you can have a good, loving marriage without Jesus, but it will be a dead marriage, failing to connect with you at your deepest level. You’ll effectively have a Pinocchio: a great puppet that imitates a live relationship but at the end of the day is just made of wood.