Sally was enraged that her husband, Bob, had completely shut down after a disagreement they’d had. She felt abandoned and alone, even punished by his silence. “Why won’t he talk to me?” she asked plaintively. But Bob had channeled his anger into quiet resignation, partly because he felt he was under siege by a wife who wanted to talk constantly about everything.
“What’s wrong with a little time to think by myself?” he said, looking a little exasperated. As a consequence, he became defensive in almost every conversation he had with her. His bunker mentality, however, only made things worse. So there they were, stuck in an implacable conflict that left them both embittered and emotionally distant. Though each had been determined to have a marriage unlike the chaos of the homes they grew up in, they were duplicating that toxic environment nonetheless.
When Jesus was asked by the Pharisees about His position on the conditions justifying divorce, He responded by launching into a soliloquy on marriage drawn from the Old Testament (Matt. 19:4-6). You might think, at first, that He didn’t understand the question. But, of course, He knew exactly what they were asking. What He was really saying was, “If you put as much effort into your marriages as you do in poring over the reasons for getting a divorce, you wouldn’t have so many divorces!” In a few words, Jesus demolished the entire rationale for their obsession with divorce. At the same time, He established one of the greatest principles of marriage ever uttered: “….at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female; for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So, they are no longer two, but one” (Matt. 19:4-5, italics mine). From the context of his message, I believe it’s clear that Jesus was talking not so much about our physical separation as He was our emotional independence from our parents. Just as emotional intimacy is crucial to proper physical intimacy, so our independence is necessary for full oneness with our mates.
As a therapist, I have found this principle to be profound in its implications for understanding why some marriages flourish and others seem to wither and die. In effect, Jesus was teaching us that, unless each person emotionally emancipates from his or her parents, he/she will never fully bond to the other as males and females were intended by creation to do. By emotionally emancipating, I mean opening the baggage each brings into the marriage from their homes of origin to determine what they need to let go of, change, and keep.
This means that both the husband and wife must examine their assumed rules of conflict engagement (those that were originally adopted to cope with their family experience) to determine whether they work now in their marriage. Rules like what you do when conflict arises or when you get angry, what you do with your preferences and desires (i.e., whether you verbalize them or not, and, if so, how?), or what your home taught you with respect to a man’s and woman’s role in marriage, and so on.
Unless you review these previously learned ways of relating, and do so with your spouse, you are likely to repeat the same mistakes and therefore create the same dysfunction that existed in your homes of origin. That’s why Jesus was teaching us the importance of avoiding this unnecessary pain. In effect, He was urging His listeners to discover which rules they learned at home that now clash with rules their spouses learned in their homes. If we don’t re-examine these carefully, we will often end up in the kind of struggles that Bob and Sally are unexpectedly facing.
Jesus knew that these conditioned responses to others can become so much a part of us that we rarely think about them. Since we have nothing else to compare our experience with, we implicitly assume everyone else understands and therefore should respond to the world in the same way we do. The problem is that they don’t.
These rules established by our family history also explain why, when there is conflict, we often think our spouses are not fighting fair. The truth is, they are usually engaging us in ways we were never taught to handle (or never taught to find acceptable). When we are blindsided by such “unfairness,” we become angry and confused (“Can’t you understand that what I’m trying to say is….”). The disillusionment that typically follows aggravates every other difference in the relationship, differences which were once attractive but are now seen as reasons reinforcing that it was a mistake to get married in the first place.
Many marriages encounter serious trouble when each spouse feels betrayed by the “shocking insensitivity” of the other. The rules of engagement that they have always known suddenly seem violated without remorse. Without emancipation from mother and father, they are inevitably caught up in either-or conflicts for which they see no real solutions. All they know is that the romantic, playful, mutually serving behaviors of courtship have given way to the stark reality of conflict and differences in marriage. And, unless they seek the knowledge of Jesus’s teaching on the matter, they will remain largely misunderstood.
Is it any wonder that healthy marriages begin with listening intently to the instruction of our Savior? No one comes from a perfect, mistake-free home. So why should we believe that we can carry over, unchanged, the habits we learned from childhood to our marriages without any consequences of relational discord?
The good news is that God has not left us to figure out these things on our own. In His grace, He has provided us with a blueprint that, if followed, will result in fulfilling our hopes and dreams for a happy, successful marriage. After all, from the very beginning, He designed it that way!
