Every Good Marriage Dies

Marriage needs a better PR agent. Countless films and TV shows have portrayed marriage at opposite ends of the spectrum, as either dream-come-true fantasy (The Notebook) or a death-trap nightmare (A Marriage Story). Should a marriage ever serve as an on-screen storyline, it is often either the promising beginning or the bitter end. Rarely is there a realistic portrayal of the in-between. So what is marriage actually like? And how does it survive the middle stages?

Apparently, a happy marriage has a lot to do with expectations. Goethe once said, “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Relational counselor Terry Real has campaigned for decades to destigmatize marital strife, coining a term for the inevitable moment when a couple feels incompatible: Normal Marital Hatred. He goes so far as to say, “The day you turn to the person next to you and say, ‘This was a mistake. This is not the person I fell in love with,’ is the first day of your real marriage.” According to Real, the rhythm of every relationship follows a pattern of harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness is followed by disruption which (at least, hopefully) returns to closeness. Yes, the disharmony is dark, but just because it’s dark doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. Of course, he bemoans that our culture refuses to teach this relational rhythm. Rather than accepting reality, we will end a relationship as soon as it meets disharmony. Having said that, how do two people actually get from disharmony to repair?

There is a scene in The Four Seasons, Netflix’s new dramedy co-written by Tina Fey, in which a husband and wife are struggling to work out a rough patch in their marriage. The discord is not the result of a major offense, but rather countless minor infractions. Kate (played by Fey) resents her husband Danny (Will Forte) for always coming off as a likable “good guy” while she takes care of the tedious grunt work of day-to-day life like paying bills and folding laundry. While neither are directly at fault, both are to blame. Danny is fun, but immature. Kate is responsible, but a little mean. The contempt slowly builds until they finally hit an impasse.

Kate and Danny remain committed to each other, but the solution is just as intangible as the problem. In the same vein as Goethe, Danny warns couples of having unrealistic expectations. “People like to say they’re poly or not into labels, but, even in a throuple, somebody’s got to clean out the air fryer,” he says. Kate agrees, saying, “Even in an ethical situationship, you can’t miss a car payment.” Humbled by the reality of marriage, Danny and Kate seem resigned to tolerating each other. The passion might be lacking, but at least they’re committed, right? Of course, while the marriage is technically functional, it’s a far cry from “happy.”

In one scene, Kate offers a solution, saying, “We know what we have to do. We just have to buckle down and work on it and keep working until it’s OK. This is just what marriage is.” It sounds like conventional wisdom. If you want your marriage to work, you need to make it work? This is how marriage often feels. Like car maintenance or home repair, one needs to spend time, effort, and money on a marriage in order to keep it going.

A strategy to take charge and manifest a loving relationship by sheer willpower is guided more by law than gospel. The distressed couple that resolves to do (and be) better embarks on a joint journey of self-improvement. They try to check any number of boxes to repair their relationship — go on a romantic getaway, take up a new hobby together, go to marriage counseling. Such efforts may make a marriage more livable, and persistence might just get your through dark days. But is love ever borne out of white-knuckled checkmarks? Perhaps things can take a turn for the better. But it’s fair to ask whether the whole expenditure might add an increasingly unbearable list of “shoulds” to an already tenuous situation that ends with one partner opting out.

Thankfully, God works not through self-betterment, but through death and resurrection. In a sermon preached by Charleston Wilson a couple of months ago, he tells a story of providing marriage counseling for a husband and wife who had been married for many decades. After about 45 minutes of the couple fighting while he tried every textbook technique he could think of to help solve their problem, an idea hit him like a ton of bricks:

I was really overcome by it. I leaned over calmly, looking them directly in the eyes and, being as articulate as I could, I said, “I’ve got good news for you today. Your marriage is over … You heard me right, your marriage is dead. And the best thing we can do today is bury it right here in this office so that God can give you a new one.” They agreed … and it worked! On the spot! It works 97% of the time! They left holding hands.

When a marriage is terminally ill, maintaining the status quo is the equivalent of life-support. Death may be postponed, but a full recovery is unlikely. The miracle of grace shows us an alternative. Rather than “making a marriage work,” what if it was made a new creation?

Such is the nature of law/gospel theology in everyday life. As clichéd as it might be, “Let go and let God” is the best plan for success when we reach our limits. Where the law kills that which needs to die, the gospel resurrects as something altogether new. Something better than we imagined possible. When the expectation of how one’s spouse should be is put to death, the actual spouse can be loved as they are. The ideal thing has been laid to rest and, in its place, the real thing begins to take shape. What does this actually look like? It can look like any number of things. But there’s always a good chance that repair has something to do with grace.