I am just two weeks away from my deadline for my next book, and I’m preaching the next three weekends here in Colorado, so this week I’m running an excerpt from Sacred Marriage. It addresses one of the most common questions I hear individuals asking when their marriages hit a rough patch. As I explain in the excerpt, I think that’s entirely the wrong question to ask.
The Question that Can Destroy Your Marriage:
“Did I Marry the Right Person?”
One of the least productive, and indeed most destructive mental exercises in marriage is to spend any time asking ourselves a spiritually dangerous question: “Did I marry the right person?”
This question saps energy from something that can be done—focusing on taking a less than ideal situation to a better place—at the cost of solving a “problem” that can’t be solved: rewriting history.
Once we have exchanged our vows, little is gained and much harm can be done by asking this question. A far better alternative to questioning one’s choice is to learn how to live with one’s choice. A character in the Anne Tyler novel A Patchwork Planet comes to realize this too late. The book’s thirty-year-old narrator had gone through a divorce and now works at an occupation that has him relating almost exclusively with elderly people. As he observes their long-standing marriages, he comes to a profound understanding:
“I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they’d married the right person. Finally, you’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she’s become the right person. Or the only person, might be more to the point. I wish someone had told me that earlier. I’d have hung on then; I swear I would. I never would have driven Natalie to leave me.”
People dwelling on rewriting history usually do so selectively, ignoring even obvious benefits that have arisen from their first choice and naturally assume that virtually any other choice would have been easier or better. I’ve talked to too many people in second marriages to believe that this is always true. Second, it ignores a rather huge issue: if you had married someone else, your children wouldn’t exist. I’d put up with a lot of disappointments in marriage if that was the price I had to pay for my kids to be alive.
Instead of wishing you could do something that can’t be done—rewriting history—why not put all that energy and focus into trying to make tomorrow’s history a little better? That’s achievable, at least.
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