My wife and I have enjoyed taking classes on marriage. Some might think that classes are for the ignorant. We choose to believe that classes are just ways to boost your intelligence. It’s like in your last year in college you’re allowed to audit classes. No grade, no stress, just the joy of learning. It was in this spirit that my wife and I audited several classes in our married life.
Our first class was by Brent & Janis Sharpe, pastors and marriage counselors we met in Tulsa, Ok. Their class was excellent. We learned so many great tools for a healthy marriage that it was like an embarrassment of riches. I would highly recommend that you check them out.
Other classes that Robin and I took were not as helpful. Yeah, if I’m honest I would have to say that some were downright bad. One class in particular was so bad that it was guaranteed to taint your marriage with a negativity that I didn’t know existed. Those speakers will remain nameless. They deserve to be exposed but I don’t want to be sued. I will, however, expose the crappy advice that they have birthed into the world.
I call this collection of idiocy the seven deadliest lies about marriage or The Seven Myths of Marriage. These lies have been told over and over, like the worst Whisper Challenge ever, but are about to be exposed right here, right now.
Lie Number 7: The Honeymoon is over after the first year.
I can’t figure out why anyone would believe this. I wouldn’t think anyone believes it except other people seem so eager to use the phrase ‘the honeymoon is over’. It’s as if they think it makes them sound smarter, like trying to use a new five syllable word you just learned (How is your prestidigitation today?). Well, it doesn’t make you sound smart it just tells us that you watched the movie Akeelah and the Bee and didn’t understand any of the words she had to spell.
The reality is that the honeymoon is never over unless you want it to be. I think the problem is due to a confusion between the honeymoon and the vacation. The vacation is what you take from a job. You stop working, leave the state you’re in, go to some exotic and euphoric place. You eventually leave that place, go back to your home state and start working again.
The honeymoon is different. In a honeymoon, you leave the state of singleness, enter the exotic and euphoric state of marriage and – stay there. Your honeymoon may include a vacation but it doesn’t end when the vacation does. The honeymoon can remain as long as you want. As if you took a vacation to an all-expense paid resort in the Virgin Islands then never left the cottage.
Lie Number 6: Money is the #1 reason marriages end.
I think this comes from marriage counselors who double as financial planners. Wherever it originates, it’s wrong. Neither money, nor the absence of money, causes marriages to fail. Money is a thing. It’s the love of money that is the evil lurking in your marriage. Put clearly, it’s the love of the power derived from money that is the evil lurking in your marriage. Whatever it is, just know that there is no paper created by the government that can cause you to get a divorce. And this includes digital currency not regulated by a government (I’m looking at you bitcoin).
It would be silly for me not to acknowledge that money is the scorekeeper for the things that people want. I can tell what someone values by where their money goes. And if what you value is different from what your spouse values then it will look like money is breaking you apart. If that’s you, please don’t blame money. Dig deeper and acknowledge what is really going on. In fact, go on a pauper’s date with your spouse where you have as much fun as you can without spending any money. When you come back, deal with your power and control issue and stop blaming money.
Lie Number 5: Half of all marriages end in divorce.
This one is based on a statistic so it really must be a lie. If we’ve learned anything from Mark Twain (“There are lies, d**n lies and statistics.”) it’s that statistics are the worst type of lies. He knew back in 1906 that anyone can use a well placed statistic to bolster a weak argument or convince people of something that just isn’t true. In this case, the (lie) that 50% of marriages end in divorce just isn’t true. Unless you want it to be.
To determine my truth, I looked at statistics from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. In the last reported year, 2016, there were 2,245,404 marriages and 827,261 divorces. My calculator tells me that is a 37% divorce rate. Although that is over 800,000 divorces too many, it doesn’t constitute a 50% divorce rate. Even if you dig deeper into the state-by-state data you will find geographical variation in the divorce rates (better in Iowa and worse in Texas). There is probably some city in America where the perfect 50% statement is correct but in the rest of the U.S., it’s a lie.
I think the worst part of the lie is the implication behind it; the fear that the lie is based on. When people hear that famed 50% statistic they interpret it to mean that a happy marriage is a crap shoot. As if your wedding vows are like a roll of the dice. Whenever you say them, God rolls a pair of dice in heaven (Come on, give me a seven, a seven, a seven…) and, no matter what you do in your marriage, the dice will determine whether you live in marital bliss or crap out.
Well there is no randomness in marriage. There are unexplained occurrences and things you didn’t expect but they’re not random. Everything that happens in your marriage begins and ends with you and your spouse. Your success is based on either your involvement with the rest of the world, or your reaction to it. Just think of it this way. Most people have a friend of a friend who has been married a lot. Let’s call him Vegas Joe. If Vegas Joe gets married, and divorced, 1,000 more times this year then that could raise the divorce rate in your city over and above 50%. But did that do anything to negatively affect your marriage?
Lie Number 4: Marriage requires you to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life.
This should be true. At least in a puritanical and biblical sense. I think it’s only true if your spouse doesn’t change. If he/she refuses to grow, refuses to change jobs, refuses to become educated or entertain new and original thoughts then – Surprise! – the only way to have sex with someone else is to embrace swinging as a pastime (which I’m NOT recommending).
The good news is that people change. My pastor used to say, If something is healthy then it will grow. I think this applies to every living thing. If your spouse is healthy then he/she will change. They will grow and change into a better version of themselves, a better version of who God created them to be. The key is to embrace the change, enjoy the evolution, and realize that they are moving closer and closer to the perfection that God intended.
Lie Number 3: When you marry someone you are marrying their family.
This lie is more of a half-truth, stemming from the Biblical directive for husband’s to leave father and mother to cleave unto their wife. Genesis 2:24 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and is joined to his wife.” The fact that there is no mention of the wife leaving her father and mother has caused many to (mis)understand this as a directive for every husband to spend every major holiday with the wife’s family because, “the Bible said…”.
Again, the lie is in the half-truth. The better directive from Genesis 2:24 is from the second part of the scripture which says “… for two shall become one“. It doesn’t say the husband, wife, the mother in law, the father in law and the sister become one. Nope, just two people – me and my wife – become one. So, I will forever respect her Dad but I didn’t marry him. I will always love her mother but….
Lie Number 2: Marriage takes work.
This one is controversial. I get it. We’ve been told that we have to put work into our marriage, we have to work to make it work and it won’t survive without putting in the work. My take is simple. Marriage doesn’t take work, it takes effort. And that effort is so much fun.
You’re probably not convinced so let me give you an analogy. If you want to exercise, you can burn 150 to 350 calories by either A) jogging on a treadmill alone or B) having sex with your spouse. One of those options takes work and the other takes effort. Which would you choose?
Lie Number 1: Love ain’t enough.
And the number one deadliest lie about marriage is…Baby, love just ain’t enough.
I think I heard a version of this lie from, of all people, a former pastor. Thank God I was already married at the time but, I recall a Sunday where one of the assistant pastors in the church was talking about newly married couples. She started by describing them as, “You know the ones, all bright eyed and hopeful. The ones who think love is enough.” I was waiting for her to get into a message on the power of love when she followed her initial statement with ‘I felt sorry for them. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that love ain’t gonna be enough.’ Then she broke into a condescending chuckle.
I would like to give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she may have meant to say, “this young couples’ love was a great start and, they would face challenges and need to fall back on that love in order to make it through.” I hope that’s what she meant. But what she said, and what hundreds of others have said to me personally, is that love ain’t enough.
Since she didn’t preach the message on the power of love then I’ll preach it. The short version anyway. Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13 and jump to verse 4 for a breakdown of what love is and what love isn’t.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NIV
That’s it, end the sermon, pass the offering plate and go home. And while you’re eating your Sunday night fried chicken, take a minute to ponder whether you could be married to a spouse who took 1 Corinthians 13 as their job description. I think I can. I believe I did. And I know, for a fact, that a love like that is more than enough.
And Honorable Mention goes to…
I wish I could say that these seven lies were all that I could think of. It’s unfortunate that I had to cut off a sizable chunk of the list I could have made [Anybody want a list of the top 100 Deadliest Lies About Marriage?] I left them off of the list but I didn’t forget them. I’ll bring them in for a future blog post so that we’re not faced with too much negativity at once. In the meantime, let me know what lies you have heard about the awesome union of marriage?