There is not much fighting anymore. Apathy has taken root. Expectations are low. Hope is fading. You’re both tired. You’re tired of fighting. You’re tired of nothing getting better. You’re tired of being alone in the same house.
You don’t remember what it is like to share a laugh or a piece of chocolate pie. You dress and undress in separate rooms. You communicate only to get things done, but never enough to let your guard down.
Your marriage is in trouble. Now what?
Stay put.
Everything inside of you says to run away. Removing yourself from the relationship seems like the most reasonable thing to do. By now friends and family are advising you to walk away. They just want you to be happy. You just want to be happy, and walking away appears to be the best chance to salvage a least a piece of happiness for both of you. You don’t want to fight, so you’re ready to fly.
When there is physical abuse, persistent sexual sin, or illegal behavior, you need to relocate. When your spouse abandons you, there’s little else you can do. That, however, may not be your story. There are exceptions, but it’s likely that your marriage is in trouble because you, like many of us, are bad at marriage. As a well-practiced sinner, you have developed attitudes, behaviors, and priorities that fail your spouse and suck the life out of your marriage.
You naturally think that distance between you and your spouse will solve the problem when in fact you will discover that you can’t run away from you.
You and all of your baggage go everywhere you go.
That helps explain the increasing failure rate for second and third marriages. You are at least half the problem, and some day you will likely remarry someone who was at least half the problem in their last marriage. Those are not promising odds.
Instead, just stay put. God has asked that of you. Actually, He has commanded it because He knows that two sinners do not naturally do the right thing when the right thing creates excruciating pain. God’s Word to us and our commitment to Him, however, bolt our feet to the floor. The best news and our real hope is that God’s grace is sufficient to sustain us when our will no longer can.
Turn to God.
You have prayed for your spouse and your marriage, but God has not come through. The problems are the same, maybe worse. Nothing is better. So now rather than turning to God for help, just turn to God. I’m not suggesting that asking for help is inappropriate, but I am saying that God does more than give help. He is our help.
Turning to God is in essence returning to God.
We do not enjoy the benefits of God’s power outside of intimate fellowship with him, and our sin, not anyone else’s, breaks that fellowship. In King David’s prayer to God in Psalm 51, he asked for grace with a heart of personal contrition and repentance. He took responsibility for his sin and blamed no one else. As Jonah sank to the bottom of the sea, he prayed a prayer of repentance to fulfill his vow (Jonah 2:1), and the Lord rescued him.
So rather than complaining to God about the sins of your spouse, come clean to God about your own sin.
Instead of confessing your spouse’s sins, get alone with God and pray like David, “Surely you desire integrity in the inner self, and you teach me wisdom deep within. Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:6-7).
Open up.
Trouble makes us loners. We live public lives but carry private pain. We are afraid that if people know we struggle they will not think well of us, but marriage trouble is rarely as private as we think. People who know you already know. They see how you interact with your spouse. They hear what you say. They notice your schedules leave little room for one another. They may not know the details, but the absence of love is hard to miss.
What may bother you more than people knowing your marriage is in trouble is the level of accountability that going public creates.
When people know, you are not only exposed, but you are also expected to do something about it.
That is the beauty and the burden of living in community. The beauty is in being fully known and loved anyway. The burden is being known and loved, and still confronted with truth. So when your marriage is a mess, reach out to someone who loves you too much to lie to you. Don’t advertise your pain to the world, but open up to someone who loves Jesus, has loved their spouse for a long time, and who will gently and wisely walk with you through your next decisions.
You likely need professional help. It will cost you, but it is far less expensive than a divorce, the new apartment, and airplane tickets for your kids to see their daddy at Christmas for the next 12 years. You cannot fix what is broken, but God has given faithful friends, a church family, and the Holy Spirit to help you.
Learn something new.
Someone said, “Old habits die hard,” but the bad habits die the hardest. Maybe you did not see a healthy marriage modeled during your childhood. You didn’t see a husband and wife serve one another, fail one another, forgive one another, and treat one another with honor and respect. Instead, you may have watched your parents fail, fight, and finally give up after years of dysfunction.
In fact, the whole institution of marriage is buckling under your feet. You look around and find very few people really enjoying and fulfilling God’s purpose in marriage. The result is that you simply don’t know what to do. You do not know what is possible, and you certainly do not know how to make it work.
So learn. If you applied yourself, you could learn a new language, a new job skill, or a new hobby. Recently, my son learned how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. It took time and effort, but he learned something new.
Marriage is more complicated than a puzzle, but it is a relationship that people from diverse cultures have enjoyed for centuries. Sure it’s hard, but you can learn.
You will need a biblical theology of marriage so you can understand the goal of marriage and the grace of God available to you. You will need to learn new communication skills, how to speak and how to listen. You will need to learn new ways of dealing with unmet expectations. You will need to learn how to show grace, gentleness, resolve, and respect. You will need to learn that marriage is not about being served, but about serving. So you will need to learn the best way to serve your spouse.
Learning something new is always awkward at first. It doesn’t feel right. It’s uncomfortable and clumsy, but with time, practice, and the power of the Holy Spirit, you will make progress. When you recognize the bad habits that created this mess and learn new habits, you will begin to see your spouse like God sees your spouse, as someone created by God, broken by sin, but worthy of enduring love.
Not only is it God’s will for your marriage to survive, but He can create something better than you ever imagined. So stop walking out, start reaching out, and trust God to restore your marriage to the portrait of grace it was created to be.
