A Christian Counselor on the Illusion of a Low Maintenance Marriage

Do you want good mileage and performance out of your cars, but with low maintenance? Many tend to want much at a minimum cost. It’s not that great a leap to approach marriage as we do our cars. But it’s magical thinking to expect great performance with minimum service and cost. Every marriage is high maintenance, but it may not be so in the way we think. It is easier to categorize one’s spouse as ‘high maintenance’ than it is to take a hard look at oneself.

Marriage Challenges Us to Grow

Marriage is ‘high maintenance’ because each partner needs self-maintenance if love, intimacy, desire, and partnership are to grow. Every person on the planet comes into adulthood with unmet emotional needs, losses, a reservoir of pain, and a history of foolish choices in reaction to it all, alongside a few wise choices. We all need continual personal growth, consideration from our spouse, attention to self-care, honest self-awareness, and a hope outside of ourselves. I have learned in my own marriage that it is far easier when hurt to blame my spouse and to project negative intentions onto her than it is to spend time accurately reading her heart and mind and looking critically at my own perceptions and choices.

The psychologist Dr. David Schnarch, in his book Intimacy and Desire, describes marriage as a growth-prompting relationship. It challenges us to mature individually in order for the relationship to thrive. Compromise, negotiation, and active listening are all helpful tools to be utilized in a marriage, but they have limited effectiveness when you cannot agree to disagree and move on. While communication is often presented as a core struggle in marriage, Schnarch contends that most couples actually have little trouble communicating, i.e. they know the message their spouse is giving. The problem is that they don’t like the messages being given.

Confronting Our Own Weaknesses in Marriage

Marriage involves a hundred daily dilemmas which are the stuff of high maintenance. Am I willing to hear the hard messages that my spouse is speaking? Will I ask hard questions of myself or will I continue to blame my partner? Is my perception reality, or could I be wrong? Will I confront my own weakness or continue to focus on my partner’s? Where is my intensity coming from? What pain did I bring into this marriage and what will I do with it? How have I contributed to where we are? What am I committed to be in this marriage? What am I willing to do to move us forward? How much will I depend on what my spouse says, does, and believes about me for my worth, validation, and sense of self? Am I willing, in love and honesty, to give the hard messages that my spouse needs to hear? Am I willing to do what is right in the situation, even if it is hard, unacknowledged, or not reciprocated? Marriage demands that each partner mature or it will languish or die.

Christian Counseling for High Performance in Marriage

Because marriage calls for a life partnership, it invites us to bring the best in us to bear on our daily interaction with our spouse. We are broken people and so our marriages are also occasions that can bring out the worst in us. That is where we all need God’s grace to cover us and our partner. Because God is gracious to us in Christ, we can offer grace to one another. Christian counseling assumes the need for grace and affirms the need for personal responsibility. To follow Jesus’ command to love others as He has loved us (John 13:34), means that we will often be called to sacrifice ourselves for our spouse . To become mature requires honest self-assessment. To be free from the tyranny of others’ opinions means embracing how God defines us through the love and sacrifice of Jesus. These are key choices in marriage. Christian counseling can help you to engage in honest self-assessment, support God’s view of the self, and equip you with the skills necessary to endure hardship and experience fortitude.

None of us can grow personally apart from relationship; we need to be in community. We cannot mature in our marriage without honest, loving, and at times, hard interaction and engagement with our spouse. The high maintenance required is really self-maintenance toward growing a true sense of self, a deep connection with one’s spouse, and long-term endurance through painful times. If you are interested in how this can be true in your own marriage, I invite you to contact me.

Photos
“Le temps de la confrontation (5),” by L’Echappee Volee, Flickr CreativeCommons (CC BY 2.0), “The Couple,” by Pedro Ribeiro Simoes, Flickr CreativeCommons (CC BY 2.0), “Couple in the Field,” by Bruce L, Flickr CreativeCommons (CC BY 2.0)