Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (4 page)

Have I mentioned we still hadn’t had sex? When your husband is calling his dad, asking what to do when you haven’t had sex yet, you can be sure this is not the honeymoon he had in mind!

The last day of our honeymoon, I had healed enough to go outside and not feel as if the sun were going to melt my skin off. We decided to rent a Jet Ski. Yes, a Jet Ski—in the saltwater ocean. Justin was in the driver’s position, and I held on for dear life in the back. To Justin’s delight, we quickly approached a yacht that was creating some intense waves. He yelled over his shoulder, “Hold on!” I wanted to ask what for, but he immediately put the Jet Ski in full throttle and aimed to hit the wave dead on.

As I flew twenty feet
over
Justin, I heard the people on the yacht shouting, “Oh my . . .” I landed in full belly-flop position, and as I came up out of the water, the blisters on my face popped, skin was hanging everywhere, and I looked like a battered wife, not a newlywed on her honeymoon.

There is no question that our wedding and honeymoon were not as spectacular as either of us had imagined. But we were young and in love, and what brought us together was not only a love for
God and each other, but a shared vision to change the world for Christ. In the grand scheme, there was still so much life to live, and we were ready to start living it together.

JUSTIN:

When we returned from our honeymoon, I still had one year of college to complete, and Trisha was starting her sophomore year. She had taken a year off of school to save for our wedding. Trisha and I first moved into a cheap and roach-infested apartment, but we decided this was too much to bear despite its $150 price tag, so we moved into a tiny house. It was actually an old garage that had been converted into a house. It wasn’t that attractive, it wasn’t that nice, but the rent was $225 per month, which fit well into two college students’ budget. And there were no roaches.

Shortly after the fall semester started, we found out that Trisha didn’t have the flu as we’d thought. She was pregnant. The honeymoon was
definitely
over. We were four months into married life, learning to live together and to balance school, work, basketball, and college life. Our differences began to rise to the surface. Those little things that were so cute when we were dating all of a sudden weren’t so cute: they caused conflict. I was a night owl; Trish was a morning person. I was a hit-the-snooze-button-multiple-times person; Trish was a get-out-of-bed-two-minutes-before-the-alarm-goes-off person. I spread things out on the desk so I could find them; Trish stacked things up so they looked organized.

One of the biggest fights our first year of marriage came the day we celebrated our first Christmas as a married couple. We were going to see our families for Christmas break, so we made plans to meet at home after class and open gifts before we left. Trisha had to be at work that day before I had class, so she got up first, got all of the gifts she had purchased for me out of the closet, and laid them beautifully under the tree. I woke up and saw the gifts under the tree, taking that as a cue to get ready for our gift exchange.

I went to the closet, grabbed the gifts I had purchased for Trisha, and put them in a pile on the couch. I made a nice little sign that said “Trisha’s Gifts” and placed it on top of her pile. I grabbed the gifts that she had purchased from under the tree, placed them in a pile on the recliner, and made a sign that said “Justin’s Gifts” for my pile. I felt a sense of pride in the accomplishment that I had organized our Christmas presents and they were now ready to be opened. I got ready for my last day of class and went to campus.

Trisha came home from work to find the presents she had meticulously placed under the tree stacked up in a pile on the recliner. She had no idea what happened. This was before cell phones and text messaging, so there was no convenient way to communicate to me, “What in the heck were you thinking, moving my beautifully placed gifts?” So she took both perfectly stacked piles of presents and repositioned them under the tree. She then left for campus to take her last exam.

You can see where this is going. I came home from class, saw the gifts back under the tree, and was totally confused.

Trisha came home from class, and I said, “Why are all the gifts under the tree? I took the time to stack our gifts in piles and to make signs labeling your gifts and my gifts. Why would you move them? That isn’t how we do Christmas!”

“I don’t understand why all the gifts are on the chairs,” Trisha shot back. “The presents stay under the tree until we’re ready to open them!”

“That’s not how we do it in my family.”

“What kind of family just stacks the gifts in piles? That’s silly.”

I then did what no man should ever do. “You’re just angry because your pregnancy hormones are out of whack.”

Trisha ran to our bedroom and slammed the door, crying. We were only a few months into our marriage, but we had quickly developed the skill to say things we knew would hurt the other person.

“You are being way too emotional!” Trisha called out to me.
“I can’t believe you would get so bent out of shape over Christmas gifts.”

“You’re acting so immature!” I yelled.

“I can’t believe you are so insensitive. How could you not even think about my feelings? You are so inconsiderate!”

“Inconsiderate! How am I inconsiderate? I bought you gifts that we don’t have the money for so you can insult me about how we open them! That’s
real
inconsiderate!”

“I hate you!” she screamed, and locked the door.

Hate me?
I thought.
She
hates
me? How does she hate me? Don’t we have to work our way up to hate? We can’t start at hate! It should take years for her to hate me. Where do we go from here?

The conversation was over. I didn’t know what to do, so I took the opportunity to restack the gifts into piles to prepare for opening. It would be a few hours and many apologies before we were in a place to open gifts, but they would be ready when we were.

In this ordinary moment, gifts that were bought with love and thoughtfulness were now a visible reminder of the vast differences between us. There was a huge gap between the relationship we’d thought we had just four months earlier and the relationship that rose to the surface in the face of conflict.

JUSTIN & TRISHA:

GOD HAS A VISION FOR YOUR MARRIAGE

When a man and woman first get married, they don’t yet know what they don’t know. In fact, it would seem that most of us who get married think we know it all, right at the beginning. Trisha and I (Justin) certainly held the belief that our marriage would be different. That we would overcome the issues that plagued other couples. That we loved each other more than most couples. After all, we talked about our family differences. We could talk about anything. We knew each other better than anyone else knew us. Our marriage would be different.

There is no doubt that we all want our marriages to be anything but ordinary. The great news is that God has a vision for our marriages as well. God longs for us to see and experience the vision he had when he created marriage. Look at his vision:

The man said,

     
“This is now bone of my bones

          
and flesh of my flesh;

     
she shall be called ‘woman,’

          
for she was taken out of man.”

Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

God’s idea is completely wild: “They become one flesh.” We don’t usually say “one flesh” in our world today, but God’s vision for our marriage is
oneness
. What God calls
oneness
, we call
intimacy
. Often when we think of the word
intimacy
we think of it in purely sexual terms. Yet the word
intimacy
literally means “to be fully known.” Intimacy, as God envisions it, is to be fully known by our spouses—emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

This passage reminds me that our vision and dreams for our marriages aren’t too big; they are actually too small. We can’t out
dream our Creator when it comes to our marriages. We often settle for ordinary when God longs for us to experience extraordinary. Genesis 2 shouts to us, “You’re not crazy!” The longing we have for a rich and fulfilling marriage has been given to us by God. Our desire to be fully known and loved comes from a God who knows us fully and loves us anyway. This passage is a mandate for us to not settle for anything less than extraordinary:

a: going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary

b: exceptional to a very marked extent
¹

Maybe you’re asking yourself,
What on earth does it mean to have an extraordinary marriage?
What sticks out to Trisha and me in this definition is the phrase
going beyond what is usual
. That most likely describes what your dating life was. A man might open the car door, think up unique places to eat, and always plan ahead to create time together that was even better than the time before. A woman might surprise her man by cooking his favorite meal, buying him tickets to his favorite game, or choosing to go to an action movie rather than a chick flick. Couples often wonder why it was so fun to date each other but why that same excitement feels so unrealistic for married life.

Where would you rate your marriage in the area of
extraordinar
y
? Can you think of a recent time you had an extraordinary experience with your spouse? If yes, what made it feel extraordinary? If your answer is no, what comes to mind as to why extraordinary experiences don’t happen for you?

GREAT AT FALLING IN LOVE, ILL-EQUIPPED TO STAY IN LOVE

We are really good at falling in love. But what we see reflected in the divorce rate is that we are really bad at staying in love. We know
how to get married happy; we aren’t really good at staying happily married. There are a few reasons why over time we tend to drift into unintentionality.

The first is familiarity. Think about the car you drive today. Do you remember when you first bought that car? No one was going to eat in it. You were going to change the oil every twenty-five hundred miles. You washed it twice a week. You made the kids sit on plastic so they wouldn’t mess up the pristine seats. But after a period of time, without even realizing it, you treated your new car as you did your old car. You stopped washing it twice a week and just waited for it to rain. The kids now eat snacks from yesterday’s leftover McDonald’s off the floor. Once the shine wears off, the glitter fades, and the familiarity sets in, you treat things differently. We do the same with our spouses.

The second reason it is hard to stay in love is that we live at a point of exhaustion. As we get older, our energy levels go down while our responsibilities go up. Marriage takes a lot of energy. It takes energy to listen. It takes energy to resolve conflict. It takes energy to put someone else’s needs ahead of your own. It takes energy to raise kids. Because we are exhausted, we think we can neglect our marriages and stay in love.

But remember the equation we gave at the beginning of the chapter: time + unintentionality = ordinary.

NEW & NOT IMPROVED

We mentioned before that one of the things that helped us develop in our dating relationship was traveling together. Not only did we travel for sports, but each weekend we would travel to a little church in Indiana and lead youth group together. We logged a lot of miles. The drive from central Illinois to central Indiana in the winter is flat and open. There isn’t much to see while driving back and forth. There are just miles and miles of cornfields between cities.

One Sunday while we were driving back to school, I (Justin) was not paying close attention to the road, and we drove through a flock of birds taking flight. Birds surrounded the car, and I found myself ducking (as if one were going to hit me). As I ducked, a bird flew right into the windshield and splattered feathers, poop, and blood all over. Now Trisha cares deeply for animals. She cares even more deeply for animals that die a violent death right in front of us. She immediately started crying, and I panicked. In a moment of insanity, I simply turned on the windshield wipers. That only smeared what was on the windshield, and Trisha cried harder. I tried to use the windshield washer fluid to remove what residue I could, and we drove back to campus in silence.

I bring this story up because it illustrates some moments we all face in our marriages: those moments when things beyond our control hit the windshields of our lives, when circumstances crash into our marriages and we don’t know what to do. In an effort to make our marriages better or to make our issues simply go away, we turn on the windshield wipers, which really only make matters worse. It is easy to offer simple solutions for marriages that attempt to merely wipe away what is visible.

People are so much better at medicating symptoms of their marriage issues than at diagnosing and treating the root causes of marriage problems. We work on communicating better. We read books on anger management. We try to understand love languages. We listen to sermons on marriage. We go to marriage conferences. We try to wipe away all that is visibly wrong and fail to go deeper into the heart of our relationships. Yet we experience only incremental, inconsistent improvements in our marriages.

And we do the same thing in our relationship with God. So often, we would rather have God medicate the pain in our hearts than do what it takes to bring complete healing to us. So we learn to live with spiritual illnesses while looking for ways to make ourselves feel better. We go to church. We sing the songs. We pray the prayers. We join small groups or Sunday school classes. We may
even give regularly. Yet we experience only incremental, inconsistent growth in our relationship with God. We do a lot; we just change very little.