Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Marriage Manifesto
The Marriage Manifesto
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Consuming Marriage
Chapter 1: Marriage is for Losers
Chapter 1 : Marriage is for Boundaries
Chapter 2: Insurrection in the Vows
Chapter 3: A Newlywed Uprising
Chapter 4: The Rebellious Way to Fight
Chapter 5: Revolution When the Loneliness Sets In
Chapter 6: A Rebellion for the Years of Familiarity
Chapter 7: An Uprising on Easy Street
Conclusion: Beyond Marriage
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Preface
I recently pulled Stephen Kings On Writing off the shelf. I
opened its pages to discover them warped and water-stained.
Mold had grown inside the cover. The book was fattened by
moisture long since evaporated. I scratched my head,
wondering when it had last rained in my office.
And then I remembered.
In the spring of 2004, my wife and I packed up all of our
belongings and our nine-month-old son in a small U-Haul,
and moved from State College, Pennsylvania, to a western
suburb of Chicago. We had completed our course work in
clinical psychology, and we were setting out to begin our
internships at two Chicago hospitals.
Chicago was having a rainy season, and the U-Haul roof had
a hole in it.
My books got the worst of it.
I remember that day clearly, because it was the first day of
the most difficult year of my life and the most painful year of
our marriage. My wife was commuting into the city at 6am
every day, arriving home near dark most nights. In between,
I was delivering and retrieving our son from daycare,
squeezing in my own internship, and trying to remain sane.
When your back is against the wall like thatwhen you have
no money (thankfully, the Chipotle restaurant manager
thought our kid was cute and gave us plenty of free food), no
time, no energy, and no way outyou have two choices: get
scared and run, or get angry and fight.
We fought.
In one of our deepest valleys, a door was slammed so hard in
our tiny, rented apartment that the frame was cracked right
out of the plaster.
My wife and I are pretty determined people, and our
marriage has always been number one. But I think there
were plenty of moments in that year when we wondered if we
could make it. The truth is we might not have, if we had
continued to expect our marriage to fulfill all of our hearts
desires.
The brown-tattered pages of On Writing are a reminder to
me.
They are a reminder of what can happen in our lives when we
remain determined to redeem the pain and to make the place
of suffering the birthplace of transformation. When we
decide we will trade in our competitive selves for a sacrificial
life. When we trade in divisive blame for a healing
compassion. When we trade in comfort for the long-hard
work of companionship. When we trade in our neediness for
service. When we trade in our strength and perfection for
weakness and vulnerability. When we trade in certainty for
wonder and mystery.
The pages of our lonely, painful stories may remain warped
and stained by our historywe cannot change the past. But
we can begin to write new, redemptive chapters in our lifestories. And your marriage can be a beautiful new chapter.
Are you ready to write your story?
Introduction:
Consuming
Marriage
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These are the truly abusive marriages, the ones in which one
spouse dominates, the other submits, and in the process,
both husband and wife are stripped of their dignity. These
are the marriages of addicts and enablers, tyrants and slaves,
and they may be the saddest marriages of all.
But there is a third kind of marriage.
The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But
a decision has been made, and two people have decided to
love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most
important thing of allthemselves. In these marriages,
losing becomes a way of life, a competition to see who can
listen to, care for, serve, forgive, and accept the other the
most. The marriage becomes a competition to see who can
change in ways that are most healing to the other, to see who
can give of themselves in ways that most increase the dignity
and strength of the other. These marriages form people who
can be humble and merciful and loving and peaceful.
And they are revolutionary, in the purest sense of the word.
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A Marriage Rebellion
In marriage, losing is letting go of the need to fix everything
for your partner, listening to their darkest parts with a
heartache rather than a solution.
Its being even more present in the painful moments than in
the good times.
Its finding ways to be humble and open, even when
everything in you says that youre right and they are wrong.
Its doing what is right and good for your spouse, even when
big things need to be sacrificed, like a job, or a relationship,
or an ego.
It is forgiveness, quickly and voluntarily.
It is eliminating anything from your lifeeven the things you
loveif they are keeping you from attending, caring, and
serving.
It is seeking peace by accepting the healthy but crazy-making
things about your partner because, you remember, those
were the things you fell in love with in the first place.
It is knowing that your spouse will never fully understand
you, will never truly love you unconditionallybecause they
are a broken creature, tooand loving them to the end
anyway.
Transformed Losers
Maybe marriage, when its lived by two losers in a household
culture of mutual surrender, is just the training we need to
walk through this worlda world that wants to chew you up
and spit you outwithout the constant fear of getting the
short end of the stick. Maybe we need to be formed in such a
way that winning loses its glamour, so we can sacrifice the
competition in favor of people. Maybe what we need, really,
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A Smile or a Grimace?
Watch them.
He stands waiting. Brow glistening. His friends lined up
behind him like faithful penguins. And the doors open and
she appears radiant and bathed in white and she begins to
glide toward him and her face is like the sun. And his smile
widens and now his eyes are glistening.
With a blessing from her father, their hands are joined and
they turn to face the person who will walk them through the
ritual, joining them forever. The questions are asked.
Do you take this man to be your husband?
Do you take this woman to be your wife?
For better or worse?
And, from both, I do.
Watch them. Watch closely.
Something is off. They make this for-better-or-worse
promise, this eternal commitment of their hearts, this gutsycourageous vow to remain through anythingheartache and
a lost baby and a house fire and joblessness and sickness and
pestilence and even death. And how do they make this
promise? With a smile. In fact, they look downright relieved.
Watch them closely, because they are finalizing their marital
commitment with the kind of smile you would wield while
making a 1-Click purchase on Amazon.
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Freedom in Confession
Freedom from the wound and the blame can only be found in
confession. Confession is the redemption of blame and
invincibility.
The couples who transform my psychotherapy office into a
confession booth are the marriages that find healing.
They confess the lie, first to themselves and then to their
partner. Although this kind of honesty can be terrifying, they
do the gutsy-courageous thing, and they trade in blame for
vulnerability. They become story-tellers, sharing the fullness
of their own stories and the depth of their life-long wounds.
They confess that the needs they brought into the marriage
were born in a particular relationship at a particular stage of
life, and they share the ache of a wound that may never be
fully healed, because the people who originally inflicted the
wound cant (or wont) be a part of healing it. They quit
demanding for their partner to bestow a healing word or a
corrective action. Instead, with fear and trembling, they
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Mysterious Marriages
How might we enter into this kind of mystery and revel in it?
I think we can begin by dipping our toes into the on-going,
unsolvable mystery of the people to whom weve committed
our lives. I think our marriages could be a training ground
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might look into the rebellious eyes of our child and melt at
the mysterious universe behind them.
We might trade in the violence of certainty for the aweinspiring peace of the mystery, and in doing so we may
unleash freedom in our marriages, and in our families, and
in our friendships, and in a world being held captive by the
need for certainty.
And the mess of marriage would remain a mess. But it would
become a mysterious mess in which we can joyfully make
our home.
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not they will stay together. Not what they say. But how they
say it.
The couples who recall the early days of their relationship
the good and the bad timeswith smiles and laughter and
softness are more likely to stay married.
When I meet with a couple for the first time in my office, I
administer this interview, and I look for the signs. I want to
see if this couple can remember. Can they remember those
early years? Have they protected that place in their hearts?
Have they clung to a sense of gratitude for the dawn of their
relationship?
Grateful Realism
The early years of a relationship are, circumstantially, often
the most difficult. Early careers, job transitions, lean
finances. Rented apartments and sketchy landlords. Drafty
windows and thin walls. Clothes from resale shops and wine
from the bottom rack. Leftovers and cheap fast food. Tiny
televisions and rabbit-ear antennae. Toilet seats always up
and clothes never in the hamper.
Broken pasts and uncertain futures.
The early years of our romance and marriage are often a
mess. And yet we find ourselves, in the midst of it all, deeply
grateful for the otherthis person who wants to be with us in
the mess and somehow transforms it into the deepest of
satisfactions.
We cherish our partners in those years. When their fuse is
short, our patience is long. When they screw up, we take
them out to dinner. We forsake the to-do lists for long
mornings under the covers.
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Rebellious Marriage
We must not transform our marriages for the sake of the
marriage. We must embrace the truth that marriage is
always intended to point beyond itself. We must decide that
marriage is not an end, but a means to an end.
Marriage is never meant to be the place where we are finally
satisfied. Marriage is meant to be the beginning of an
insurrection. An uprising on a global scale.
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Its Time
Go. Be a loser and live sacrificially.
Go. Be committed and give birth to the joy of it.
Go. Be vulnerable and heal the world with your authenticity.
Go. Be unified and shower the world with compassion.
Together.
Go. Be lonely with a world aching for communion.
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