Marriage: What's Love Got To Do With It? Part 1

"What's Love Got to Do with It" is a song recorded by the American singer Tina Turner, released in 1984. It was taken from her fifth solo album, Private Dancer and became Turner's most successful single. Tina Turner’s song spells out a story of two people who are trying to have a relationship based purely on the physical element while pushing their hearts and emotions aside to avoid getting hurt. It may sound good in theory, but this is an empty, lonely, and painful approach to relationships. It’s a sad song that reminds us of how lost people can become on the trek to true love and relational satisfaction.  Our culture often paints a rosy picture of relationships: you meet that perfect someone who makes your heart race and gives meaning to your life. So, you throw away your cares, cautions, or conflicts bogging you down as you skip off into the sunlight together, and you believe that life with your perfect soul mate will be euphoric and easy. Unfortunately, that scenario is not realistic. Over the years, I have had to personally grow in both my love and relationship with my wife Andra. When I got married at age 27 I had no idea what love meant. Like most young men, I had all the normal human emotions and passion for this beautiful young woman I met. But I had no idea what loving her, marriage, parenting, and the stages of life maturing processes we would go through were all about.  I asked a dear friend of mine, who had been married for sixty years or so, what he could tell me about marriage.  His reply was, “First, you’ll never understand a woman.  Second, when she is all out of sorts just give her a big hug and let her melt in your arms.  Finally, brush your tongue!”  Lol.  Though true it still didn’t provide me any greater insight to the journey I was about to begin on some 30+ years ago.

Someone once said, Marriage is about growing together or growing apart. Working at your relationship and marriage is a personal decision for both parties. If a marriage is to survive you have to begin to understand that love is more than an emotion.  The word “Love” is a verb. It’s based on an Old Testament word, loving kindness. It requires attention every day.  It’s all about showing each other acts of love and kindness to each other on a regular basis and it’s labor intensive.  Nehemiah 9:7 says, “You are a God of forgiveness, Gracious and compassionate, Slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness; And You did not forsake them.”  God has modeled to us what it takes to build a healthy marriage.  I Corinthians 13:4-7 explains to us that, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”  Nothing listed here is easy to do and no couple I’ve ever met has successfully achieved these lofty notions of love, that Paul writes about, without going through some pain.

If I were to counsel a young man about marriage the first thing I would want him to know is that marriage is God's design to call us from independence to interdependence to understand the call to maturity and union between Jesus and His Church. It requires a commitment to grow through each stage of life. Just living together and living independently of one another in a marriage is the primary cause of divorce. People need to be committed to becoming one in the union of a marriage not just choosing to live together. The primary purpose of marriage is to grow up two adults into the stage of life known as interdependence. When a couple fails to take extraordinary care for one another; fails to take care each other's emotional, physical, relational, spiritual, intellectual needs; fail to take each other in account when making decisions; it all leads to frustration, disappointment and painful experiences which can result in fight/flight behavior. Fight /flight behavior is evidence of lack of self-differentiation and a identity disorder (know who you are). This leads to acute anxiety disorders and an inability to become one in marriage and is the chief reason why couples don't make it. Before I was married Andra's pastor introduced me to some very important insights about personal growth, stages of life, and how our emotional and spiritual growth was inter-related. So, I began to read everything I could on the subject. I also read in the bible several important passages on the subject. Hebrews 5:11-14 says, "We have many things to say, which are hard to for you to grasp since you have become dull of hearing..." Marriage has taught me a lot about myself.  In Andra's church, they had a personal inventory test created by a Christian therapy group in California, which asked a series of questions which revealed areas in your life where you had strengths and weakness. The Church pastoral team would use the results of this testing in the premarital counseling program.  I was completely closed-minded to them testing me since I thought "If God brought us together, what on earth do I need to be tested for?" After all, I loved her, she loved me and we had heard clearly from the Lord we were to be together. Well, let me just say, I was like every other young man I know, I was a fool.  Just because God brings you together doesn't make you an expert on how to stay together. John Sandford, author of "Transformation Of The Inner Man, says, "Marriage is designed to grind."  What I can tell you is this, the woman or young man you marry will push every button within you where your emotional pain is.  The purpose for that is that God has designed marriage to call you out of your self-life. Through the years, I've learned that it's hard work getting over yourself.  Marriage is not about you!  When you refuse to allow someone to counsel you in the early stages of your relationship with the person God brings into your life, you will find yourself in a marriage counselors office addressing the very things you would have been counseled on in the first place. Marriage is not about you. It is always about the other person you marriage.  Like everyone else I know who have been able to sustain a healthy growing relationship, I've had to work on myself to keep growing and thriving as a person and my wife has had to do the same.  However, I want to make sure you understand one thing.  You are not responsible for your spouse's personal growth. You can't fix what your mate will not fix themselves.  As the Hebrew writer informs us, closed-mindedness makes spiritual growth hard. 

There are several books that can help us understand emotional and spiritual development, Gail Sheehy's,"Passages,"  David Levinson, "Seasons Of A Man's Life," and James Fowler's book, "Stages of Faith: The Psychology Of Human Development and the Quest For Meaning" have all been helpful to me in pursuing my own personal growth.  Other books that were helpful were Dr. Kenneth Hagin Sr.'s "Growing Up Spiritually," Gerald Derstine's "Destined To Mature," and Juan Carlos Ortiz's book, "Called To discipleship.  Each of these books taught me that there are stages or passages of life that we all need to go through in order to grow in our love and relationship with our spouse. In each stage, you have to do the work of the decade your in and you cannot skip a stage. Western Pop Culture fails to teach us how to navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood. Too many people reach their physical prime without ever attaining psychological maturity. Put plainly, in today’s world, growing up is hard to do.  What happens between life passages is considerably more important to the process of maturation than are the passages themselves.  The primary work of maturing takes place gradually every day as we apply ourselves to the developmental tasks of our current life stage. In I John 2:11-13 We find three development stages that all of us have to go through.  The Apostle John wrote these words, “I write to you children because you are forgiven.” “I write to you young people because you’ve overcome.” Then he writes, “I write to you fathers because you’ve known him from the beginning.” There are three major life transitions we all have to master in our personal development if our marriages and families are to thrive and prevail.

The first stage of development is childhood. According to I John, this stage of life is where we are to learn that we are “loved unconditionally.”  The homes we are raised in set the tone for us to live life.  If you were raised in a home where love was expressed “conditionally” then you too often will find yourself learning that love only comes through performing.  This is called “Performance Orientation.”  All you have to get love is perform or act in a way to get kudos and off you go “performing” to get love, acceptance, and affirmation by performing for others the rest of your life. Living this kind of life is exhausting.  The Apostle John understood that a child needs unconditional love, forgiveness, affirmation and total acceptance.  A child needs to belong - not be told you belong only when you do what I say.  They need to belong even when they fail.  “Unconditional love” is a hard concept for people who have been raised in homes where “Performance Orientation” prevails.  It’s also a hard concept to accept the unconditional love of God and the work of salvation in your life when your whole life has been built around “Performance Orientation.”  Ephesian 2:8-9 says, “For by grace (That unearned love and forgiveness) have you been saved through faith; and not of yourselves, it is a gift of God; not as a result of your works, that no one should boast.”  You cannot earn the love of God because it is unconditional.  His saving work is a gift to us.  If our parents model love, forgiveness, affirmation and total acceptance you may find life passages easy to transition through.  However, if you were raised “striving to win acceptance” or “striving to be the good child” too often you will come into marriage with wrong attitudes about “love.”  Galatians 1:10 states, “Am I now trying to win the approval of men (husband/wife), or of God?  Or am I trying to please men (husband/wife)?  If I were still trying to please men (husband/wife), I would not be a servant of Christ.” Healing will not come from our own efforts, nor by finding new and better ways to perform.  What is needed is to offer grace to grow, forgiveness, and unconditional love in our relationship toward one to another.  This is not an easy task. Part of learning to embrace our lives fully begins with dealing with our childish thinking, attitudes, and behavior.  I Corinthians 13:11 says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”  I found that one of the first aspects that marriage requires us to address our childhood attitudes that developed in our family context growing up, "give up those childish ways of thinking" and learn to how to emotionally mature by doing the work of the life stage you are in. Choosing to personally mature is the most loving gift you can give your spouse. Childhood is all about "self-centeredness" and dependency. Marriage is all about interdependence, demonstrating love and care for the other in your life. It's not about you!

The second stage of development that the apostle John refers to is, “I write to you young people because you have overcome the evil one.”  Wow. This is a loaded, powerful, verse.  Young people have to learn how to overcome life passages in adulthood, how to manage life effectively, temptation and adversity. A lot of things can be said about each area of life that every young person needs to overcome. It's taking the things that we experienced through our upbringing and knowing how it effects you in a it in a different context. With all the marriage breakdowns in our culture today, one of the greatest concerns i have for young people today has to do with sexual fidelity before marriage. Our culture has become highly sexualized and porn has become easily accessible. In Today's millenial culture there is an attitude that sex comes with the first date. Some even think that marriage is not necessary. What most young people have to overcome is broken trust issues and asn inability to know how to build a healthy relationship with one another. Trust building begins with knowing how to honor and respect one another - not self-gratification.

Let me be very clear, sex was a God idea. Premarital sex can be very harmful to a relationship in several ways. In my professional pastoral counseling experience, I have found that when a young man chooses to have sex with his girlfriend and then marries her she doesn't trust him in the relationship. In her mind, even if she seduces him, if he will sleep with her before the marriage, he will cheat on her after they are married. Why? Because he didn't exercise self-discipline or honor her. He only reinforced that all a man wants is sex. There maybe some instances where this is not true but in most of the marriage counseling I've done, I found that most relationship breakdowns are rooted in the "Trust" that broke down at the beginning of a couple's choice to have sex before marriage. A woman was to know if her man is trustworthy and will test him. In the scripture, there is an amazing story about Joseph being seduced by Potipher's wife and him resisting her. Our sexuality is a gift from God and was designed to be given within the context of a sacred covenant of marriage. I Cor. 6:18 warns us, "Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits is outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body." When couples engage in premarital sex it impacts their future of the sexual well-being as a married couple. The easy access to pornography also impacts couples in very negative ways. Again, I have counseled great numbers of young men and women who found that even after marriage their addiction to porn was greater than sexual fidelity. Marriage does not fix porn problems it only hurts it. We need to learn how to overcome not only the sexual temptations but those areas of hurt that have resulted from our sexual engagement with other partners before we got married. Despite George Michael's song, "Sexual Healing" doesn't begin by bedding down tonight. It begins with repentance. Understanding the issues of intimacy that God calls us to begins by understanding what love is. So basically, what the

Apostle John tells us is "emotional and spiritual" growth is all about self-control and fleeing those areas of life that have to do with self-gratification and shortcuts. The Apostle Paul wrote in I Cor. 6:18 "Stay away from sexual sins. Other sins that people commit don't affect their bodies the same way sexual sins do. People who sin sexually sin against their own bodies."  Modern research of the brain has shown that our brains are recording devises. When we engage in sexual activity before marriage it becomes a reference point. These references can become as they say "the devil's workshop." When your sexual life goes through different phases your first sexual reference points can tempt you to "go back" in our minds and compare our current state of our marriage to those earlier reference points (as though it was better back then) and end up hurting our relationship to ourselves and those we love. This is why porn, extra-marital relationships, addiction, and other breakdowns happen in marriages because we let the old tapes play in our head. According to John we care called by God to become overcomers. Overcoming begins with true repentance not tring to convince yourself you'll never do that again. Real love requires self-discipline and applying the cross to every area of our self-life. Enough said!

There are many other marriage experiences that show us our need for personal growth. How we handle money, planning, parenting, work schedules, friendships, church life, nutrition,healthcare habits, and may other areas of life you will go through with your marriage - all demonstrate what we didn't learn growing up and need to overcome. Each of these areas can help us move forward or remain stuck in a stage of life that we should have moved on from in our adult development. In my next installment of this blog we will talk about each of these developmental areas and how again God uses our marriage to call us forward into a real place of growth.