Marriage Problems Can Be Caused By Ignoring The Marriage

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear,” Ambrose Redmoon.

“Your tongue is a rudder.
It steers the whole ship.
Sends your words past your lips or keeps them safe behind your teeth.
But the wrong words will strand you.
Come off course while you sleep.
Sweep your boat out to sea or dashed to bits on the reef.”

“How is our marriage being used to enhance beauty, seek justice, and destroy evil?” (114)

Referenced from “Intimate Allies” by Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman III

Marriage is creating order out of chaos. It is two people shouldering the same yoke and trying to plow a field together; despite their different motivations, desires, goals, and priorities. At first, it is fun learning to play house. You bump into one another occasionally as you awkwardly figure out how to navigate living together and the adjustments it makes to your relationship. But, as Meg learned in Little Women, marriage is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes you fight. And looking after each other loses some of the thrill it had when you were just dating.

In their book “Intimate Allies” Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman III use the analogy of God designating Adam and Eve as Earth’s guardians to illustrate the responsibility required for a successful marriage. “The purpose of every marriage is to shape the raw material of life to reveal more fully the glory of God. Either we labor to enhance glory, or we exploit the beauty of creation for our pride and pleasure.” (73) Just as there are people who take advantage of our stewardship of the planet to abuse it for their own gain, people sometimes neglect to put something back into their marriage after taking something out.

The Effect of Neglect

Goldie and Aaron have been married for 14 years. Goldie has spent the last 12 years inching her way up her law firm’s ladder, and is finally being considered for junior partner. Aaron works as a freelance graphic designer from their home and looks after the kids. Every day distractions and personal goals have pulled the couple in different directions. Their relationship is one of their last priorities. Like many breadwinner parents, Goldie has come to view Aaron more as an assistant than a spouse, and Aaron stopped including Goldie in the household management years ago. It’s not so much that they are actively sabotaging their marriage, as they have neglected to do anything about its general decay.

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen. 1:28 ESV) Imagine if Adam and Eve had shirked their duties as Eden’s caretakers– animals wouldn’t have known what to call each other; the Earth would have started some kind of galactic takeover because no one was subduing it– utter chaos. Well, it might not have gone like that. But whatever Adam and Eve would have been doing instead would most likely have failed to reflect God’s glorious creation the way taking care of it and showing it off to its best advantage would have. Just as ignoring your yard for several months eventually creates a jungle, so ignoring your marriage eventually creates a snarled relationship that takes a long time to pick out.

A marriage is a relational representation of the Garden of Eden. God places two people in charge of a relationship that requires constant attention and nurturing if it is to ever benefit the caregivers or bring glory to God. “We are to serve one another so that we become like Christ and so that the other equally is molded in his image. In so doing, our marriage becomes the fertile ground to offer new birth and the growing of life to others.” (86)

Where Did our Love Go?

When spouses neglect to nurture their relationship, marriage gets boring.  Marriage becomes an obligation you don’t particularly enjoy and don’t attend to unless you absolutely must. Weeds flourish where you should have flowers and the young trees you planted in the beginning have long since withered and died. “After the Fall, we are called to shape not just a formless world but a hostile world… Nature, society, and our own inner world present a level of chaos that is both evil and dangerous.” (91) Because of the pervasive influence of sin, you can’t just ignore your marriage and expect it to stay where it is. It will decay. You cannot set something aside temporarily, or abandon it altogether, and expect it to be the same when you come back. Sin and neglect corrupt and eventually kill everything.

Aaron and Goldie did not intend to move away from each other, they were slowly pulled apart by individual concerns and responsibilities. But this does not excuse their responsibility regarding the condition of their marriage. We are called to be stewards of what God gives us, be it a talent, church ministry, relationship, or this planet. And to be commendable stewards, we have to take the initiative to care for our responsibilities. We can’t just focus on what we want to, as Aaron and Goldie did, and hope the things we ignore do alright fending for themselves.

It’s like the parable in Matthew 25 of the boss who went out of town and left some money in the care of three of his servants. The servants who invested the money and earned more were praised by their master, whereas the third who just buried it in the backyard got a tongue-lashing. Good thing it was metal coins, because if it had been paper money, it likely would have been destroyed.

Fixing up Your Garden

With their 15^th anniversary approaching, Aaron and Goldie both had small epiphanies. They realized they hadn’t discussed doing anything to celebrate the milestone. They sat down for the first time in years and had a serious conversation about what was going on in their marriage and decided to start seeing a professional marriage counselor.

During counseling they talked about some of the technical things that had gone wrong with their relationship: communication, partnership, intimacy, etc.  They also talked about God’s vision for marriage, where they fell short of it, and what they could do to get back in that line of sight. “When couples engage in honest and lengthy conversation, they expose the core battle with self-glory and the many forms of degradation in a marriage.” (98) But it’s not just sitting down and talking about your feelings; you need to address the problems in your marriage (which are problems in yourselves) and commit to correcting them. “How we talk to each other reflects the quality of our relationship as well as the depth of our character. Good speech quells chaos and promotes joy and life; bad speech produces chaos and leads to despair and death.” (99)

This was the structural flaw in Goldie and Aaron’s marriage. They did not talk to each other unless it was about their children. Through their actions and lack of words, they had left their marriage to languish while it waited to be dug up from the back yard. However, as they learned during Christian marriage counseling, wisely chosen words can be the remedy that fixes their marriage.

“We must choose our words as if we were choosing an instrument of life or death… We are to speak words of encouragement to draw forth the heart of God in those we love; we are to speak words of rebuke to disrupt the natural bent of our hearts to pride and self-righteousness. We are to know our spouses, know ourselves, and use a common sense that is based on an ever-deepening understanding of scripture.” (105)

Christian Counseling for Neglected Marriages

Ignoring your marriage is one of the easiest things in the world. As long as nothing too terrible is happening, it is not that hard to ignore how mediocre it is when you have so many other things demanding your attention. If you think this is a problem for you and your spouse, consider making an appointment with a Christian marriage counselors. They are prepared to help you and your spouse use those words Allender and Longman talk about to identify problems in your marriage and each other and figure out how best to correct them. Professional Christian counselors use therapeutic skills and biblical principles to understand how things went wrong, and how to bring your relationship back into alignment with God’s vision for stewardship. Just because your marriage does not pay your mortgage, or need to be picked up from softball, doesn’t mean it will not suffer if you ignore it. You owe it to yourself, your spouse, and the Lord to care for your marriage the best you can.

Images cc: freedigitalphotos.com -“Lovable Family Of Five” by photostock
“Father Posing With His Cute Daughter” by imagerymajestic