Staying One: How to Avoid a Make-Believe Marriage

Staying One

HOW TO AVOID A MAKE-BELIEVE MARRIAGE

A Workshop for Individuals, Couples, and Groups

Clinton W. McLemore

with Anna M. McLemore

Staying One

How to Avoid a Make-Believe Marriage

Copyright © 2017 Clinton W. McLemore. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9418-8

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9420-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9419-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: McLemore, Clinton W. | McLemore, Anna M.

Title: Staying one : how to avoid a make-believe marriage / Clinton W. McLemore with Anna M. McLemore.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-4982-9418-8 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-9420-1 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-9419-5 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Married people—Psychology. | Married people—Conduct of life.

Classification: BV835 M251 2017 (print) | BV835 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. January 9, 2017

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Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Bible.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NRSV) are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (REB) taken from the Revised English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1989. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

To the Reader

Chapter 1. The Relationally Dead

Chapter 2. Marriage and the Gospel

Chapter 3. Communication in Marriage

Chapter 4. Good and Not-So-Good Marriages

Chapter 5. How We Train Each Other

Chapter 6. Divorce, Separation, and Affairs

Chapter 7. Affirming Your Spouse

Chapter 8. Male-Female Differences and Marriage Cycles

Chapter 9. Modes of Expressing Love

Chapter 10. Constructive Disagreement

Chapter 11. Marriage as Negotiation

Chapter 12. What Sex Is and Does

Chapter 13. Romance, Eros, and Etiquette

Chapter 14. Resentment as the Lethal Emotion

Chapter 15. What Every Man and Woman Wants to Hear

Chapter 16. Drafting a Marriage Compact

Chapter 17. A Check List and Some Guidelines

Topical Outline for a Workshop

Bibliography

Drawing on years of clinical and personal experience, Clinton and Anna McLemore have written a down-to-earth book filled with nuggets of practical wisdom. The text is peppered with exercises that, if completed with open minds and hearts, will help steer couples of all ages and stages toward deeper connection and more satisfying marriages. This book is a gift to couples and the churches who care about them.

—Cameron Lee, Ph.D, CFLE, Professor of Family Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary

"Clinton and Anna McLemore have created a valuable roadmap for any couple interested in learning how to create the marriage they have always wanted. The combination of biblical truth, psychological research, and the wisdom of lived experience make Staying One: How to Avoid a Make-Believe Marriage an invaluable tool for building an authentic, real-life, passionate marriage!"

—Laura Robinson Harbert, M.Div., Ph.D, Former Dean of the Chapel and Spiritual Formation, Fuller Theological Seminary

Other Books by Clinton W. McLemore

CLERGYMAN’S PSYCHOLOGICAL HANDBOOK: Clinical Information for Pastoral Counseling

THE SCANDAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY: A Guide to Resolving the Tensions between Faith and Counseling

GOOD GUYS FINISH FIRST: Success Strategies from the Book of Proverbs for Business Men and Women

HONEST CHRISTIANITY: Personal Strategies for Spiritual Growth

STREET-SMART ETHICS: Succeeding in Business without Selling Your Soul

TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS AND HOW TO CHANGE THEM: Health and Holiness in Everyday Life

INSPIRING TRUST: Strategies for Effective Leadership

To Ken and Lisa . . . in Honor of Their Marriage

Acknowledgments

For years, we have attended Aliso Creek Church, which has proven to be an enormous blessing. Both of us vividly recall the first time we went to a worship service there and Dr. and Mrs. J. C. Cobo turned around to welcome us warmly. Those few seconds were predictive of what we have continued to experience from everyone at ACC.

As we write this, we can picture many people in our congregation, which puts us in mind of the moving chorus, They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love.¹ It is based on John 13:35. Our fellow church members are recognizable by their love.

They are also highly intelligent and deeply reflective. We frequently leave our Sunday School class almost speechless. The insights that come from the minds and hearts of those who attend are astonishing. In response to a few initial questions, the members of the class are off into the spiritual stratosphere.

We also want to acknowledge how much we’ve enjoyed and been enriched by our small group that meets on Thursday evenings. In it, we explore passages of Scripture, share what’s going on in our lives, and pray together. The richness of that hour and a half continues to grow.

The senior pastor of our church, Rev. Thomas G. Gastil, is luminescently intelligent, multidimensionally gifted, and wonderfully open. It’s a great tribute to Tom that he has refused to retreat into the bunker of ministerial professionalism.² Week after week, his sermons are saturated with unwavering proclamation of the gospel. They are thought provoking, theologically insightful, and spiritually challenging.

Staying One came about as a result of a workshop we conducted for a group of five churches. The workshop turned out to have an even greater positive impact than we’d first hoped, so it made sense to capture its contents in a book. Sharon Rockwell, an experienced lay counselor, first recognized the need for a workshop on marriage. She is talented and tireless. We very much appreciate all the work she invested to ensure that everything connected with it ran smoothly.

Our daughter, Anna-Marie, continues to act as literary advisor and gracious critic. For over a decade, she has painstakingly gone through every word of Clinton’s books multiple times before the final manuscripts were submitted, and each one is much the better for it. Thank you, Anna-Marie, for everything you’ve done with and for us over the years.

Clinton and Anna McLemore

1. This chorus, written in the 1960s by Peter R. Scholtes, is also known as We Are One in the Spirit. Several performances of it are online.

2. See McLemore, Honest Christianity, 112.

To the Reader

Marriage is the most important human relationship many of us will ever have. It’s also like a garden. To get good results, you have to tend it.

When I first heard people talk about working on their marriages, I didn’t like it. Marriage, it seemed to me, ought to be anything but work. It should be light and breezy. I have come to recognize that great marriages don’t happen by accident. They require effort and commitment.

Good marriages are rich. If heaven can be thought of as eternally desiring what you already have, a rich marriage is like that. Such marriages resemble long engaging conversations and are anything but impoverished. Good marriages are also rewarding rather than punishing. They are satisfying, pleasurable, and worthwhile. And, they are resilient as opposed to brittle. Good marriages endure. Emerging from the tunnel of whatever adversity life brings, the couples in them remain standing. Staying One contains what I believe it takes for a marriage to be rich, rewarding, and resilient.

This book contains twenty exercises and activities that are designed to strengthen your marriage. If you are about to attend a workshop built around Staying One, you will be given the opportunity to complete them during the workshop. If you are not scheduled to attend such a workshop, you can easily do them on your own. The publisher offers a Workbook for Staying One, and I recommend using it to write down and save your responses.

There is a brief topical outline for a workshop based on Staying One at the end of the book. A comprehensive Leader’s Guide is available to workshop leaders from the publisher.

Whether you’re reading this book on your own, with your spouse, or in conjunction with a workshop, I pray that what follows will significantly enrich your marriage.

Chapter 1. The Relationally Dead

You can see them in diners and coffee shops. They rarely look at each other and have little to say, apart from, Pass the salt. She stares off into space, while he keeps his nose in the newspaper. Or, both are absorbed in their tablets or phones, perhaps checking e-mail.

Once in a while, one of them grunts, but this has no communicative value, other than to remind the other that a second person is sitting at the table. They may be in their twenties or thirties, but more often they will be middle-aged or even on social security. Whatever decade of life they’re in, and however long they’ve been married, they are parties in a burned out and impoverished union, representatives of the relationally dead.

They are not at all sure how their relationship devolved into the stale and lifeless thing it now is. Neither one, in fact, may have given this much thought. They are mostly aware of how they’re lonely. All that remains is a certain sense of familiarity and a shared history. There is no romance left, and they may remain in the marriage out of religious conviction or for the sake of children. It may be that the desire to avoid the embarrassment and costliness of divorce is too strong to allow them to pursue dissolution, so they remain in their diminished marriage out of habit and inertia. Each has become to the other like an old pair of jeans, easier just to put on, ignoring the rips and tears, than to mend.

One or both may remember, now and then, how they once fell in love and couldn’t wait to be with each other. They would count the days and the hours, impatiently watching the clock. But that was long ago, when they were still living what they now consider to have been immature lives in fantasy rather than the real world. They regard such memories with cynicism, as nothing but the temporary insanity that accompanies infatuation. The relationally dead no longer believe in romance, which they regard as unrealistically juvenile. They have convinced themselves that only fools subscribe to all that. For their part, they see through it.

Unless, of course, one of them meets someone else, perhaps at the office, club, or even church. Now, suddenly, he or she has another chance, a new opportunity for happiness that, until now, seemed unlikely if not impossible. Romance, he or she again decides, is as necessary as breathing, and what used to be the lifeless shell of a man or woman is emotionally resurrected. Alive! This, however, rarely turns out to be the paradise it initially seemed.

Investing in What You Have

When you read some of the statistics contained in this book, you are likely to develop a certain caution if not skepticism about second or third marriages. Remarriages do sometimes work out well, but there is no guarantee that they will, and the odds of bettering your lot through another marriage are below 50 percent.¹ Even at the practical level, therefore, it makes sense to invest everything you can in your present one, whether or not it’s your first. And if you’re about to get married, to do the same thing, for the same reason.

But, how might you do this? How would you go about it? What steps should you take to ensure that the marriage you’re in, or are about to enter, will not only survive but thrive? What are the keys, if there are any, to enjoying a fulfilling and lasting conjugal relationship? These are the questions this book will address.

Co-Dependency and Enmeshment

I am going to devote considerable space to how two married people can continue to grow closer, which I take to be highly desirable. Some of my colleagues, however, have called this into question, suggesting that growing ever closer in a marriage is an unhealthy goal, one likely to be embraced only by the weak. In doing this, many of these practitioners have loosely used two terms that, like OCD and bipolar, have entered the culture and become trendy.

The first of the two is co-dependency. It originated with Alcoholics Anonymous and is properly used to describe a relationship in which two people depend on each other to perpetuate mutually dysfunctional behavior. One person might, for example, obtain satisfaction and validation from rescuing a spouse after bouts of heavy intoxication, protecting that spouse from real-world consequences. Instead of leaving him or her on the floor in a drunken stupor, possibly to wake up the next morning with constructive remorse, the enabler helps the spouse into bed and may even call that spouse’s employer the next day to lie about why he or she can’t make it to work.

Covering for a problem drinker just makes it easier for that person to avoid coming to terms with the alcohol abuse. It also makes it more likely that such abuse will continue. To feel valued, the rescuer needs the abuser, as much as the abuser needs the rescuer, even though both would be far better off refusing to meet these dysfunctional needs. Sooner or later, they both may suffer, since eventually there is likely to be loss of employment, or worse, avoidable illness and premature death.

The healthy and holy intimacy found in a genuine marriage bears no resemblance to co-dependency. Except by broadening the definition of co-dependency so that it becomes meaningless, it is difficult to see which unhealthy needs two married people are meeting by deepening their intimacy. Contrary to a psychological weakness or a personality flaw, the capacity to relate intimately is a strength, the very one this book is intended to foster. Some of my colleagues have, I fear, turned the world inside out by calling what is healthy a kind of sickness. Inter-dependence is a far cry from co-dependence. The two have little or nothing in common.

This brings us to the second term, enmeshment, which was coined to describe family units in which members have little autonomy or sense of self apart from identification with the family. Might it be that married people, who are deeply involved and share a great deal with each other, not only give up their freedom but also sacrifice their individual identities by being so close? Not at all. While enmeshment entails abdication of identity, deep mutual involvement balances awareness of self as an individual with awareness of self as a member of a two-person community.

There are, to be sure, marriages in which one spouse makes inordinate sacrifices for the other, has little or no sense of self apart from that other, and is unable to make even the most basic decisions without spousal direction. Clearly, these are marriages in which one person is over-dependent and enmeshed.

But healthy marriages, characterized as they are by both inter-dependence and deep mutual involvement, are hardly examples of co-dependence or enmeshment. Do we, in fact, observe either of these pathologies if two married people simply long to be with each other, obtain enormous satisfaction from spending time together, and have learned over the years to depend on each other? I think not.

As human beings, we have been created to depend on each other, especially on our spouses if we’re married. Contrary to what some suggest, it is not those who can trust and depend on others who are impaired, but those who cannot.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus prays for the disciples, that they may be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21). He might have prayed this even more urgently if he’d been petitioning specifically for married believers. We will return in later chapters to what it means for two people in a marriage to grow closer.

The Problem with Mutual Dependence

There is, however, a cost associated with married people coming to depend on each other and enjoy true mutuality: this makes them more vulnerable to pain and suffering triggered by loss. What if your beloved spouse develops a serious health problem, so that you can no longer rely on him or her for support? The giving and receiving, which used to go both ways, is now largely one-way, with you on the giving, not the receiving, side. Or, worse, what happens when one spouse dies? Was Alfred Lord Tennyson right when he wrote, better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?²

I believe that he was. Two people discovering and living in the awareness that they can count on each other for support is among the principal benefits of marriage; the other person is always there. Mutual dependence is, in fact, central to the definition of genuine marriage.

Neither my wife nor I are passive. Nor are we inclined to drift or look to others for direction. Those who know us describe us as independent and resourceful. But, in the best sense, we depend on each other and love the life we share. When we’re apart, we soon miss being together, and we long to resume the ongoing conversation that any good marriage entails. We yearn for the comfort, once again, of being with the other person, which feels like coming home.

Some people, as mentioned above, are incapable of allowing mutual dependence and involvement to develop, even though they go through the motions of getting married. Such damaged souls, incapable of giving themselves to anyone else, have little capacity to tolerate feeling vulnerable. They are insulated and guarded, and are unable to marry in any true sense. These people can take on the legal obligations of marriage, acquire the social status it sometimes affords, and legitimize their sexual activities. But the idea of becoming ever more intimate with a spouse eludes them and remains a foreign concept. Stoic individualism and rigid self-reliance are not virtues but vices.

God, I believe, wants us to be inter-dependent and mutually involved, which in their healthy forms are indicative neither of frailty nor deficiency but of strength and resilience. They reflect an emotional capacity that, in the ideal, continues to mature and develop. Being able to entrust yourself and your welfare to someone else is central to what it means to be a complete person. Without this, people remain prisoners of their limitations. This does not mean that everyone has to marry. It does mean, however, that any fully developed human being has the psychosocial capacity to do so.

The Truth About My Own Marriage

I’d like to respond to two questions that are likely to arise. The first is about the quality of my marriage. Am I saying one thing and doing another? Are Anna and I pretending a level of happiness and satisfaction that, if the curtains were pulled back, would turn out to be a lie? What is the true character of our relationship? Are we putting on false fronts?

Emphatically, the answer is no. You will find quite a bit of self-disclosure woven through these pages. But, you won’t find any spin. At the end of each chapter, you’ll read Anna’s response to what I have written. I’ve encouraged her to be candid, and as you will see, she’s had no trouble doing this.

Anna and I have been married for over thirty years. I will share what I believe about how to make a marriage work, one that in our case is between two strong people. Timid, we are not. I’ll tell you about our difficult times and even about the quality of our intimate life. And, I’ll share how we’ve learned to work out our differences so that they don’t turn corrosive and how we keep romance alive.

Superficial Answers and Trite Solutions

The second question concerns the quality of what you’re likely to find online or in a bookstore by way of marital advice. So, I’d like to make a few comments about this material and the kinds of seminars, study guides, and DVDs you may encounter at church.

There is a lack of high-quality resources available for Christians who want to ensure that their marriages will be satisfying, resilient, and enduring. People are astonishingly complex. What they bring to a marriage is not easy to understand, certainly not by the simplistic and formulaic application of clichés or truisms. Human behavior is multi-layered and, even in the best of us, fraught with psychospiritual baggage.

Part of what makes this so is that when people marry, it’s not long before they begin to perceive each other in ways that are distorted. I will go into detail about why this happens in a later chapter, where I discuss the psychology of transference. Here, I merely want to suggest that helping people with their marriages, whether through counseling or educational activities, requires in-depth savvy. It’s not a job for those with only a superficial understanding of interpersonal dynamics—how person-to-person behavior actually works.

I once sat through several sessions of a recorded marriage conference. The speaker was entertaining and engaging, and he had no trouble holding the attention of his audience. Some of what he said was well worth listening to, but I couldn’t see how most of it could help anybody. A lot of the advice he dispensed merely restated what God intends for marriages, not what to do to help them move in that direction, how to make them actually work. Or, if they’re not working, how to fix them. It was all should and little how.

There are, however, a number of excellent books on marriage, including those by Cameron Lee and by Les and Leslie Parrott. All three know what they’re talking about. Cameron is a well-known family life educator, minister, and the author of a fine book published in 2015 by the Fuller Institute for Relationship Education: Marriage PATH: Peacemaking at Home for Christian Couples. Les is a clinical psychologist and his wife Leslie is a marriage and family therapist. Of particular interest is their recent, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before—and After—You Marry.³ They have also produced companion workbooks, one for men and the other for women, and developed a widely used online questionnaire.⁴

Tim Keller, in collaboration with his