Marriage 27
I confess I do not much want to write
today's post. I fear it will be misunderstood. More than that, though, I am
afraid it will hurt people, good people, who will take my words in a judgmental
way I do not intend. Such is the case when you write about divorce. It is the
third rail – electrified and dangerous to touch. But I must if I am to write a
well-rounded series on marriage. More than that, I must if I am to convey to
the never-married and currently married people in my readership what I believe
they need to know. Or, at the least, consider.
In 2024, 673,000 marriages ended. A
small percentage initiate divorce because they want to marry someone else. This
small group will admit that the divorce is mostly their fault, though they will
often fault their partner for being unloving, thus driving them into the arms
of another. However, the typical person who sues for divorce has a long list of
grievances against the other party. Lack of commitment. Infidelity. Domestic
abuse. Incompatibility. Conflict. Financial pressure. Substance abuse. Etc.
That is a rather long list with some
ugly things on it. Put another way round, generally people divorce because they
feel their partner does not do _________, which they should, or that they do
__________, which they should not. Alternatively, it involves not what they do
but what they are, positively or negatively. Put bluntly, most people who
divorce do not think it was their fault the marriage dissolved. Statistically
speaking, 66% of men and 74% of women blame their partner primarily for the divorce. “Yes, I am sure this is partly my fault, but it is mostly their
fault. If they would have/If they wouldn’t have (fill in the blank) we would
probably still be married.”
That viewpoint is a significant
contributing factor to the possibility of divorce itself. If I tend to blame
them while exonerating myself, I am already on the road that may well end in
divorce court.
“That’s not fair, Pastor Brennan. You
don’t know my situation.”
You are right; I do not. Nevertheless,
while this blog post does not apply to every marital situation, it still
applies to most of them. And here is why: in my marriage, Mandy does not cause
me to be the way I am; she reveals the way I am.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean.
Yesterday, I set out to tackle an obscure corner of my patio that has become
overgrown with ground cover in the past few years. I wanted to put a wood rack
there, and it needed to be cleared out. In the process, while using a weed
whacker, I inadvertently sent a tiny particle of sand spinning through the air.
Somehow, it went around my glasses and lodged in my eye. The resulting
irritation was literal, I assure you. Unresolved, eventually, that sand may
well have produced an eye infection and potential blindness. Yet an oyster that
ingests sand solves the resulting irritation by secreting a substance around it
that eventually forms a pearl.
Was the sand the primary cause of the
results in the eye? No. If it were, the results in my eye and in the oyster
would be the same. It is, after all, the same substance. But the external
irritant was not the problem, really. The sand was the agent that revealed the
inner properties of the eye and the oyster.
This problem is as old as marriage
itself. And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave
me of the tree, and I did eat. (Genesis 3.12) Certainly, Eve bears guilt, but Adam bears
guilt also. He cannot simply blame her for the ensuing disaster. His bad
reaction to her wrong was just as much the cause of their crisis as her initial
wrong.
Blame is as automatic as breathing. We
like to blame others because it gets us off the hook. But divorce, though often
justified by blame, is usually at least just as much about my bad reaction as
it is about their bad actions.
Marriage reveals who you are more
clearly than any other human relationship. Many people do not like what they
see. Not in the other party, in themselves. So, to avoid seeing themselves
accurately in an unflattering way, they bail on the marriage, all the while
blaming it on the other person. They cannot handle the revelation of their own
shortcomings in reaction to their partner's flaws. Rather than deal with it
they walk away.
Some of you do not believe me yet. Let
me give you one final illustration. Why do so many people avoid reading the
Bible? James 1 likens the Word of God to a mirror. Those who do not want
to see how bad their actual condition is avoid the mirror rather than working
on the problem. Our flesh does not like to see itself for what it is – lustful,
bitter, lazy, proud, vindictive, jealous, angry, deceitful, weak, petty, and a
thousand other things. So, we avoid the Bible instinctively.
It is that same innate avoidance of
seeing ourselves as we really are that is so often at the heart of divorce. And
if I am right, divorce is not usually about my partner’s flaws as much as it is
about my own. And when I leave, I take my flaws with me, unchecked,
unmitigated, and unmortified. No matter how much I mollify myself by blaming my
partner.
Maybe, just maybe, divorce is not the
answer you think it is.
