Enduring love might require an infinite capacity for laying down your rights

This weekend, for the first time in a while, I’ll be performing a wedding. That’s gotten me thinking about all those vows we make when we marry, especially the hard ones about staying together for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.

I remembered a New Yorker piece about Kentucky’s foremost prophet and poet, Wendell Berry. It cites Berry as saying “he preferred his admittedly old-fashioned view of marriage — ‘a state of mutual help’ — to the popular idea of ‘two successful careerists in the same bed,’ and ‘a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended.’”

Which expresses my own views more concisely than I can express them. To me, an enduring marriage mainly requires an infinite willingness to be put upon by the needs, fears, dreams and myopia of another. If you’re lucky, you might even find your spouse is willing to help and put up with you.

In the New Testament, we’re told to seek the good of our spouse as diligently as —perhaps more diligently than — we seek our own good. That standard applies to husbands and wives alike. Neither gets a free pass.

But this is more idealism than reality. As with most ideals, few of us ever manage to measure up. We serve our spouse to a point, but no further.

So what does all the high-mindedness amount to in practical terms? What does servanthood mean when your spouse falls into clinical depression but refuses therapy or gets addicted to heroin or turns out to be a lying, narcissistic bonehead?

What then? What are you and I, being flawed humans, even capable of enduring?

After listening to people’s marital woes much of my life, and after 37 years of marriage myself to two different wives, let me offer a few observations.

There are exceptions to everything I’m about to say. I’m speaking of what applies to most people most of the time. But if something here doesn’t speak to you, ignore it.

▪ No matter how devoted to your marriage you might be, there are extreme behaviors you shouldn’t accept.

Eons ago, I knew a country pastor who counseled a parishioner. She’d left her husband after he hit her. The pastor told her the Lord wanted her to go back home.

“Look, preacher,” she said, unmoved, “I love Jesus as much as the next person, but ain’t no (so-and-so) gonna do me thataway.”

Which was a response recognizable to all of us. The Lord can think whatever he may or may not, but there are things we’re not willing to put up with.

▪ However, most problems aren’t that extreme.

That’s where Berry’s idea of marriage as a state of mutual help and the Bible’s idea of selfless service prove indispensable. We’re to help our partners, even when helping them saddens, irritates or burdens us. We pray that later, when we’re in need — as we will be — they’ll help us.

My parents were married 50 years. Dad’s standard line, updated regularly through the years, went like this: “Alice and I have had 25 years of wonderful marriage. And 25 out of 40 ain’t bad!”

They lost a child at birth because of a doctor’s botched delivery. The episode left my mother unable to have more kids. She fell into a darkness from which she might never have emerged except that my dad stuck with her, nurtured her, loved her. She never forgot the patience and compassion he showed, even as he was grieving, too.

Later, when I was in junior high, Dad suffered what back then was called a nervous breakdown. I lay awake in my room night after night, listening through the walls as he wept and fretted. My mother held his hand for hours, for months, for years, offering what solace she could. He too eventually recovered.

I’m sure neither of them enjoyed those lengthy periods with a mentally ill spouse. Yet they defaulted to their underlying love, and it paid beautiful dividends.

▪ No partner can make you endlessly happy. You’re a fallen human being who’s almost certainly self-deluded on all manner of subjects, especially your ideas about yourself. Your spouse is no better. That’s the human condition.

The longer you’re together the more obvious those mutual flaws and self-delusions become. There will be heartaches, some of your own making, some of your partner’s making, some beyond the control of either of you. No marriage escapes unscathed. This is normal.

▪ For as long as you can, stay. No other destination is likely to prove happier over the long haul than where you are now, because if you leave you’ll be taking yourself along with you. I heard an old preacher warn, “You’re just trading one set of problems—for the same set of problems!”

There are profound truths we only learn by sacrificing ourselves for the sake of someone we’ve sworn to love whether or not we feel like loving him. We find ourselves by losing ourselves.

A grace, a deep gratitude, settles on us as we gradually realize our imperfect spouse is daily giving up her life for us as well — that there are, here under our own roof, two people on Earth who believe we’re worth the trouble.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.