Marriage Is A Bad Place To Learn How To Love

I​n the aftermath of my divorce, I told a pastor:

“If the church wants to get better at promoting the sanctity of marriage, it will show up more on the front end of marriages - helping two people heal enough to enter one - rather than showing up on the back end of a failing marriage, holding a piece of paper over their heads as if that alone will magically heal what’s broken.”

The former approach is fueled by support; the latter by guilt.

Maybe in that moment with the pastor the judgment I received in the aftermath of my own divorce was still too fresh.

Maybe in that moment I was reflecting on all my years in the church, where I'd heard FAR more outrage about the sin of divorce than I ever heard celebration about the beauty of marriage. And even then, most of the time, in my experience, marriage was most celebrated by acknowledging that two people had found a way to "stick it out" - kept their promise - as if that's the ultimate goal of marriage - to stick it out.

Is marriage more endurance sport than gift? Trust me, I've seen plenty of people stick it out while sticking it to each other and the people around them along the journey of sticking it out.

Maybe this all resonates with me with renewed force right now as I am finishing up my memoir and realizing just how broken I was going into my failed marriage. In so many ways, I am realizing my failure didn't come after I said "I do" - it came in thinking I was ever prepared to "do" at all.

It came in thinking that in spite of never having learned how to love myself or anyone around me, marriage would be the perfect classroom in which to figure that one out. And woe be to the marriage where two people are trying to learn the same thing at the same time; who on earth is the actual teacher in that situation?

In a recent sermon, Pastor Robert Madu said, "If you don't love you, it is impossible for you to love somebody else. Ladies and gentlemen, when are we going to understand that healthy relationships are built with two healthy individuals? Many relationship problems are actually just individual issues that we never worked on in the first place, and I got a news flash. Nobody is coming to save you. Nobody can complete you."

Madu went on to say, "maybe we should quit telling people to get married and tell people to get therapy - get whole."

As I am finishing my memoir, I am realizing just how much I believed marriage was going to be a place that would magically fix my issues, when the reality is, marriage turned out to be the place that most exposed them. I believed marriage would be the place that filled all my voids, when in reality, marriage turned out to be the place where I discovered just how painfully deep those voids were.

I think the REAL beauty of marriage is that it's supposed to expose just how powerful true love can really be. I've come to believe that true love is certainly more powerful than a promise between two people who really don't know how to love. I've come to believe that love can heal what a promise can't, for without true love, it's pretty easy for someone to dismiss a promise.

Right or wrong, that is truth.

I am not writing to diminish the value of a marriage vow, I'm just trying to identify a more successful approach to honoring it. And maybe not even for you the reader, but for me the man who clearly wants to do better by that vow should that day ever come again.

I still believe in the sanctity of marriage.

I’ve just come to believe that sanctity is something we bring to the marriage - not something we wait to learn inside of it.

Or worse, once it all falls apart.