When we enthusiastically promise to love, honor, and cherish our imperfect spouse, we have no idea how we are going to successfully fulfill that vow. Dorothy Greco pulls back the veil and helps us to recognize unrealistic expectations, let go of disappointment, embrace transformation, and ultimately make our marriage beautiful. Taken from her new book “Making Marriage Beautiful.”
David C Cook
Day 1
Scriptures: Ephesians 4:31-32, Philippians 4:8-9, Ephesians 4:2
Expectations
Our wounds, personal preferences, and internalized cultural values not only inform our beliefs and actions, but they also become the foundation for many of our expectations. As we enter into marriage, we have dozens of unspoken expectations for the small, seemingly incidental details of life together (e.g., who cleans the bathroom?) as well as the major, significant components of life (e.g., who sacrifices their career to care for a sick child or aging parent?).
Sometimes we’re not even cognizant of our expectations until others fail to meet them. Sometimes an expectation emanates out of our wounds, which makes it more difficult for us to identify the expectation, let alone discern what drives it.
For example, not long after we were married, Christopher and I started having conflicts about what it meant to be home in time for dinner. After we negotiated what seemed like a reasonable compromise and then he showed up an hour (or more) late, I felt angry. He would apologize, but then we’d have a déjà vu moment the following week.
Though I had legitimate reasons to be frustrated, his offense was a level three (out of ten—not that big a deal) and my response was a level eight (in other words, out of proportion). This disparity clued me in to the possibility that maybe this dynamic was uncovering a historic wound.
When we have the same conflicts over and over again, it’s likely that there’s something deeper going on that will provide an opportunity for healing if we can stop reacting and start exploring what’s driving our broken patterns. That was certainly true regarding our ongoing discord about mealtime. When I was twelve, my grandfather died and our extended family fractured due to some poor choices and miscommunication. After two of my father’s beloved siblings moved out of state, he turned to liquor to numb his pain. This eventually led to a full-blown alcohol addiction lasting more than a decade.
During my middle and high school years, dinner could be a tense affair. Would Dad be on time? Would he be sober? If he wasn’t, how would Mom respond?
There was an obvious connection between my childhood wounds and our marital strife. Christopher’s struggle with time management uncovered my unresolved pain and amplified my unprocessed anger. My response replicated my family of origin’s patterns and certainly did not help Christopher feel loved or grow in his time management skills.
Day 2
Scriptures: Ephesians 4:26, James 1:19, Proverbs 19:11
Disappointment and Anger
Ten years into marriage, we had one of the biggest fights of our marriage. Though we were not conflict rookies, the intensity and stickiness of our anger unnerved us. It was as if this single event somehow epitomized every deficit in our marriage. Month after month, we hunkered down in our foxholes and lobbed verbal grenades at each other.
After almost a year of this unproductive behavior, we reached out to wise friends for help. Without being aware of it, we had been minimizing and avoiding our disappointment and anger. As a result, we never learned what these feelings were trying to teach us and endlessly looped around the same half-dozen fights. Sound familiar?
In the context of marriage, if we find ourselves disappointed and angry, we have four options: divest and/or quit, pretend that everything is fine (which is dishonest), try to change our spouses (which never works), or ask God to use the anger and disappointment to transform us so we can love our spouses independent of their behavior. If we want our marriages to thrive, we really only have one choice.
How do we arrive at that final option? First, we need to make a paradigm shift. We often assume that disappointment and anger indicate there’s something wrong with us, our spouses, or our marriages. Such conclusions may cause us to feel shame and, as Mike Mason points out, “to pull back from the full intensity of the relationship, to get along on only the basic requirements.”
In order to give more of ourselves rather than pull back, we need to reframe anger and disappointment as holy invitations rather than dire pronouncements. Then, as we press into these disquieting feelings, we can accomplish three important objectives: discern what drives them, decipher the message they intend to communicate, and develop reality-based expectations.
Day 3
Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, Proverbs 21:9, Ephesians 5:22-33
Reality-Based Expectations
When we experience disappointment in marriage and it’s no one’s fault (such as a miscarriage or loss of employment due to corporate downsizing), we generally grieve and figure out how to move on. It’s the disappointments that point back to our unrealistic expectations for each other that tend to be stickier. These hard-to-shake disappointments can sometimes be described as disordered attachments—misplaced desires that compete with God for our heart. By following the thread that runs through our disappointments and our persistent anger, we can uncover their origin.
Christopher and I have had our share of sticky disappointments; that’s part of what our year-ten crisis was all about. When I married him, naïve optimism overshadowed the reality that he is mercurial, does not like public displays of affection, hates flying on airplanes, and has time-deficiency disorder. (Don’t bother looking that up; I diagnosed him.) That same optimism obscured the reality that I struggle to need him, am too quick to judge, and prefer doing the talking.
These relational speed bumps were definitely not marked with fluorescent orange paint or signage of any sort. After we scraped our undercarriage and experienced whiplash more times than I care to admit, it began to dawn on us that perhaps we needed to find a more productive, less destructive path through our disappointments.
We took a similar approach to how we unpacked our gender expectations by asking probing questions such as, What if rather than blaming each other for our disappointments, we confessed our failures and owned our areas of weakness? What if we looked under the disappointments to discern if they revealed any egocentric expectations, disordered attachments, or misplaced hopes? Once we stopped avoiding these seemingly problematic feelings and started investigating them, something shifted.
Rather than continuing to blame Christopher for my disappointment, I started asking the Lord to help me do three things: repent of any unfair expectations, appreciate Christopher’s strengths, and develop reality-based expectations. Of these three objectives, developing reality-based expectations has been the most difficult. My unrealistic expectation of being romanced died an ugly, slow death because I stubbornly clung to it. Clinging is a form of denial that masquerades as hope. We persist in clinging because it gives us something to hold on to and allows us to sidestep the hard work of changing what we have control over: ourselves.
My prayers are finally paying off. I’m learning to let go of my unrealistic expectations by choosing an internal posture of holy resignation. Practically speaking, holy resignation means accepting and loving your spouse without demanding that he or she change, resisting the vortex of despair and blame, and standing in faith that God will complete a good work in the marriage—regardless of current circumstances.
Day 4
Scriptures: James 5:16, Psalms 32:5, 1 John 1:9
The Blessing of Confession
Why would any of us willingly admit our sins, especially the ones we can hide? We confess because denial thwarts transformation. If we value the appearance of health and wholeness over the real deal, image becomes everything. But if we’re serious about wanting to have a dynamic marriage, we have to move through that resistance and become transparent truth tellers.
The Old and New Testaments communicate that God hates lying (Exod. 20:16; Prov. 11:1; Eph. 4:25; Col. 3:9). I wasn’t taught this value when I was growing up. Instead, adults routinely demonstrated that lying was acceptable in certain situations. Lies were spoken as a means of protecting my father as he battled his addiction or as a way to avoid conflict.
This is why early on in our marriage, I felt no conflict by denying that I was angry when Christopher asked. Regardless of why we choose to dodge the truth, lies are lies. They deaden our consciences, prevent our spouses from knowing us, and provide no impetus to stop sinning.
Confession takes truth-telling up a notch. Rather than waiting for our spouses to ask if we finished the bottle of wine, spent several hundred dollars on new clothes, or flirted online, we forthrightly admit it—humbly and nondefensively. It’s really quite simple. As the apostle James advises, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16).
By design, confessions mortify us. We hate having others see our less-than-perfect selves. When we willingly confess our broken thoughts and actions, we allow God to create a crack in the false images that we’ve worked so hard to perfect. This crack ruins the veneer but also allows forgiveness and grace to seep in.