If you are lucky (or favoured) to have a happy marriage, please be grateful and avoid the urge to lecture other people.
Marriage is a very complex journey, with so many moving parts. All of the parts must align perfectly for both spouses to be genuinely happy in the marriage. If both partners are good and Godly people who are willing to make sacrifices and show kindness to each other, they will experience a happy marriage, but to be very happy requires some luck (or favour).
But what is a very happy marriage?
Before defining terms, it’s important to provide some context. Humans are naturally endowed with a range of strengths and weaknesses that exist on a spectrum. For instance, consider the quality of patience. Being patient is often seen as a virtue. In a group of four people, two may be very patient, but that doesn’t mean they lack breaking points; their limits will differ. The third person might be mildly patient, while the fourth could be quite impatient. This illustrates that patience, like other traits, varies across individuals.
Now, let’s apply this same concept to other human qualities such as faith, trust, love, hard work, confidence, anger, the ability to overlook things, tolerance, sexual urges, communication, forgiveness, and romantic inclinations, among many others. Each person is a unique combination of these attributes, with each quality falling at different points on its respective spectrum. We each have different tolerances, breaking points, and some aspects of our lives where we can endure far more than others might be able to manage.
The key takeaway is that every individual is a complex mix of various endowments, each reflecting a unique position along the spectrum of human qualities.
Having established that context, imagine two separate individuals coming together to form one body in marriage. Individually, they are already complex, but when joined as one, they become exponentially more complex than humans can imagine. The fortunate couples find that their partners’ weaknesses are in areas they can endure, while their own weaknesses fall in areas their partners can handle. These lucky individuals experience very happy marriages, as they do not feel the need to change each other. While each partner may endure certain challenges, their weaknesses do not push one another to their breaking points.
A word of advice for them: resist the temptation to lecture others about your happy lives and marriages. Avoid discussing the process or the how-to of making a marriage work. Instead, both spouses should recognise their good fortune, look towards the heavens, and express gratitude to the Almighty God.
When two people enter into a marital union, if one partner is unwilling to manage their complex nature and chooses to prioritise the marriage and the happiness of their spouse, that marriage is likely to be unhappy. The unkindness of this partner may stem from various factors such as cultural influences, modern ideologies, negative friendships, basic malice, self-centeredness, or a belief that they deserve better. I genuinely empathise with the partner who is willing to make sacrifices to make the marriage work.
For clarity, if both parties exhibit this unkind behaviour, it creates a dangerous dynamic, which I won’t address further. In the third category, there are situations where neither partner is intentionally unkind, yet the marriage still struggles. This occurs when there are significant overlaps between one partner’s breaking points and the weaknesses of the other. In such cases, it often feels as though one partner is shouldering a heavy burden while the other is indifferent. This can be exhausting for the partner who is committed to showing kindness and making sacrifices.
What should that kind of partner do? They should speak up. Don’t wait until you reach a breaking point where the damage becomes irreversible. Start with an open one-on-one conversation, and then involve people your partner respects. Don’t suffer in silence; unhappiness only leads to more unhappiness. Pray and pray and pray.
If you are the unkind partner, please consider changing for the sake of humanity. Life is already challenging; don’t add to another person’s burdens because of your actions.
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Featured Image by Polina Tankilevitch for Pexels.
