Marriage?

He answered, “Have you not read that he who cre­ated them from the begin­ning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What there­fore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Matthew 19:4-6

Watch­ing my par­ents go through a divorce was an expe­ri­enced that molded my view on mar­riage, and it was not the actual event of divorce but rather the years of no com­mu­ni­ca­tion and using their chil­dren as pawns that molded this change. The strange thing is that they are both pro­fess­ing Chris­tians, but you wouldn’t gather that by their actions (James 1:22-23).

From my own expe­ri­ence in rela­tion­ships (all be it not many): I have also first-​hand expe­ri­ence the result of poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion. When a couple tries to fill an emo­tional and spir­i­tual void with phys­i­cal con­nec­tions, the voids only expo­nen­tially per­pet­u­ate them­selves. Here are a few things that I’ve come to find impor­tant, for me, in a rela­tion­ship (this list is not exhaustive):

  1. Indi­vid­ual, spir­i­tual matu­rity; that is, the abil­ity to be self-​sufficient (1 Corinthi­ans 7:32-35), but exhort one other.
  2. A smart, inquis­i­tive woman; an indi­vid­ual that thinks for themselves.
  3. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion beyond simple dis­cus­sion, but the abil­ity to dis­cuss what moves each other. A pro­found level of under­stand­ing that is inex­press­ible unless one has had this experience.
  4. Uncon­di­tional love (1 Corinthi­ans 13:4-7).
  5. “Seek to estab­lish a sim­i­lar mar­i­tal phi­los­o­phy and goals before get­ting mar­ried. Make sure that you’re both think­ing alone the same lines since it will help to pre­vent or reduce any future con­fu­sion about lead­er­ship roles in the home, child-​rearing, and the numer­ous issues that newly-​married cou­ples must face.”1
  6. Mutual respect (Eph­esians 5:33) and a desire for compromise.
  7. A woman that does want to be led spir­i­tu­ally (Eph­esians 5:23, 32).
  8. Sim­i­lar inter­ests and pas­sions but yet vary­ing enough to chal­lenge each other.
  9. The under­stand­ing that divorce is not an option.

Per­son­ally, the most impor­tant is some­one who thinks for them­selves. I have had incred­i­ble rela­tion­ships with people younger and much older than I just because of the intel­lec­tual con­nec­tions I estab­lished with them. Now I need to be care­ful of look­ing for only one thing in a poten­tial mate; espe­cially since, as a believer in Christ Jesus, I need to find some­one who holds Christ in the high­est regard. I still strug­gle with desir­ing to wrap my mind around every sub­ject, includ­ing this one.

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4 total comments, leave your comment.
  1. Trent
    Nov 25th 2004

    The main part of the quote from Matthew speaks of the unity between a man and woman: “…and they shall become one flesh.” What exactly does this mean? How does this con­cept of one­ness con­tribute to a suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ship? I didn’t see this addressed so I’d like to take it up. Let me know what you think Chris!

    God, being the infi­nite cre­ator he is, decides to Be, and then he decides to indi­vid­u­ate him­self. Now we have a bunch of gods run­ning around, but, they still know that they are each other in the sense that they know they have one source, i.e. the Father. What hap­pens when they forget that they share a source?

    Well first of all, why in the hell would God decide to indi­vid­u­ate in the first place? To play games would be the log­i­cal answer—can’t play when there’s no one to play with. But what kinds of games would develop when the gods forget their common origin, when they begin to falsely believe that they are sep­a­rate?

    Here we have the birth of the win/lose type of game. You see, before, when each being really knew that it was really One Being, there could only be win/win types of games going on. After all, no one wants to make them­selves lose But after they’ve for­got­ten, they all still want to win, nat­u­rally. How­ever, falsely believ­ing they have noth­ing to do with one another, each being no longer cares whether win­ning means making others lose.

    Now, back to how this affects relationships…marriage, like every­thing else, is a game. And nat­u­rally both par­ties are inter­ested in win­ning. But if you come into the rela­tion­ship with­out knowl­edge of the fact that you are one being (in other words, with­out knowl­edge of God) then you’re mar­riage will devolve into a games where one part­ner wins and the other loses. And this is the real reason why cou­ples get divorced—no one’s win­ning any­more.

  2. Trent
    Nov 25th 2004

    Fur­ther­more, Chris you men­tioned your par­ents “using chil­dren as pawns.” Sounds like they were using you and your sib­lings to make each other lose. Also, you made a great obser­va­tion when you said that sub­sti­tut­ing sen­su­al­ity for spir­i­tual con­nec­tion cre­ates voids that are expo­nen­tial (the insight of a great mind:). This also proves what I said in my pre­vi­ous com­ment. When you have gods (notice the lower-​case ‘g’) being bodies, the way in which they immor­tal­ize them­selves is by pro­cre­ation. Two bodies coming together cre­at­ing one body–you can see how this imi­tates the expe­ri­ence of one being­ness. But it’s not quite, it’s a sub­sti­tute, as you said!

  3. Chris
    Nov 27th 2004

    The phrase: “one flesh” sig­ni­fies the impor­tance of mar­riage. This con­cept of ‘oneness’ is impor­tant, and yields suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships because you are out for the other and not just your­self. This applies for how you view mar­riage as a game of sorts (and I do not); the prob­lem was that my par­ents viewed it that way and it lead to dev­as­tat­ing results. Number 6 on my list con­tains the attribute of “compromise;” this implies that a “game to find a winner” is not the way I view rela­tion­ships at all. As for your com­ment: “God decide to indi­vid­u­ate in the first place,” that is con­tin­gent on your new age beliefs, Chris­tian­ity, nor I, holds such beliefs.

  4. Trent
    Dec 2nd 2004

    Com­pro­mise = co-​promise = mutual goal-​making. A game is made up of three com­po­nents: free­dom, barrier(s) and a goal(s). A couple makes mutual goals and work­ing with a cer­tain amount of free­dom over­comes bar­ri­ers to achieve the mutual goal. Making a com­pro­mise in itself proves the pres­ence of a game. Exam­ple: being faith­ful. Both par­ties make a promise to remain faith­ful (the goal). The bar­ri­ers? Temp­ta­tion in all its man­i­fold man­i­fes­ta­tions. The free­dom? Well, you_don’t_have_to_be faith­ful–it is a choice. Cre­at­ing the goal is what essen­tially cre­ates the game. It defines the free­dom and the bar­ri­ers involved.

    Monothe­ists must hold to this indi­vid­u­a­tion idea. How can the world of cre­ation be “outside” of God (then again, how can God be within the world of cre­ation?)? I think the Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi solved this with his com­ple­men­tary con­cepts of tash­bih (tran­scen­dence) and tanzih (imma­nence). But like I’ve said before, Chris­t­ian think­ing in gen­eral only holds to the tran­scen­dence of God and this a log­i­cal fal­lacy. For if God is omnipo­tent, he can nei­ther be said to be in space and time nor out­side space and time.

    Fur­ther­more, to try and hold that God exists even is a log­i­cal fal­lacy. For by saying that He exists you are also saying he does not “not-exist.” Your lim­it­ing God by saying that He exists, you’re con­di­tion­ing Him. Now I’m not saying God couldn’t be con­di­tional, or that He couldn’t be finite. But the typ­i­cal con­cep­tion of the Chris­t­ian God is that He is uncon­di­tioned–He would have to be if one were inter­ested in main­tain­ing his omnipo­tence.

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