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The  Marriage  Manifesto:  Turning  Your  World  Upside  Down  

 By  Kelly  M.  Flanagan,  Ph.D.  

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The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down by Kelly M. Flanagan, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2012 Kelly Flanagan, drkellyflanagan.com. All rights reserved.

This manuscript is a Reader’s Copy. First electronic edition to be published in the United States by

YourDigitalBook.com Some parts of this book have appeared previously as blog posts

at drkellyflanagan.com.

Cover design by Kristin K. Vanden Hoek

You are welcome to use a short excerpt of this book for review or critique purposes.

For more information and other queries, contact

drkellyflanagan@gmail.com.

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CONTENTS    Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Consuming Marriage Chapter 1: Marriage is for Losers Chapter 1 ½: Marriage is for Boundaries Chapter 2: Insurrection in the Vows Chapter 3: A Newlywed Uprising Chapter 4: The Rebellious Way to Fight Chapter 5: Revolution When the Loneliness Sets In Chapter 6: A Rebellion for the Years of Familiarity Chapter 7: An Uprising on “Easy Street” Conclusion: Beyond Marriage About the Author

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Acknowledgments    To my wife—my best friend and co-conspirator. To my children—who have shown me that rebellion can be dignified. To my friends—because every rebel needs a safe place to lick his wounds. To my clients—whose courage inspires me to write. And to you—if it weren’t for your readership, this would be written in a journal and stashed in my bedside table.

   

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Preface  I recently pulled Stephen King’s On Writing off the shelf. I opened its pages to discover them warped and water-stained. Mold had grown inside the cover. The book was fattened by moisture long since evaporated. I scratched my head, wondering when it had last rained in my office. And then I remembered. In the spring of 2004, my wife and I packed up all of our belongings and our nine-month-old son in a small U-Haul, and moved from State College, Pennsylvania, to a western suburb of Chicago. We had completed our course work in clinical psychology, and we were setting out to begin our internships at two Chicago hospitals. Chicago was having a rainy season, and the U-Haul roof had a hole in it. My books got the worst of it. I remember that day clearly, because it was the first day of the most difficult year of my life and the most painful year of our marriage. My wife was commuting into the city at 6am every day, arriving home near dark most nights. In between, I was delivering and retrieving our son from daycare, squeezing in my own internship, and trying to remain sane. When your back is against the wall like that—when you have no money (thankfully, the Chipotle restaurant manager thought our kid was cute and gave us plenty of free food), no time, no energy, and no way out—you have two choices: get scared and run, or get angry and fight.

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We fought. In one of our deepest valleys, a door was slammed so hard in our tiny, rented apartment that the frame was cracked right out of the plaster. My wife and I are pretty determined people, and our marriage has always been number one. But I think there were plenty of moments in that year when we wondered if we could make it. The truth is we might not have, if we had continued to expect our marriage to fulfill all of our hearts’ desires. The brown-tattered pages of On Writing are a reminder to me. They are a reminder of what can happen in our lives when we remain determined to redeem the pain and to make the place of suffering the birthplace of transformation. When we decide we will trade in our competitive selves for a sacrificial life. When we trade in divisive blame for a healing compassion. When we trade in comfort for the long-hard work of companionship. When we trade in our neediness for service. When we trade in our strength and perfection for weakness and vulnerability. When we trade in certainty for wonder and mystery. The pages of our lonely, painful stories may remain warped and stained by our history—we cannot change the past. But we can begin to write new, redemptive chapters in our life-stories. And your marriage can be a beautiful new chapter. Are you ready to write your story?  

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Introduction:  Consuming  Marriage    Last year, Thanksgiving finally succumbed to Christmas. For years, retailers in the United States seemed to respect our day of gratitude. But then the consumer-creep began. First, Door Buster deals had people standing in lines while most of us were still in a turkey coma. Then, for several years, midnight on Friday was the respected barrier—shopping and consuming were at the city gates, laying siege to gratitude and satisfaction. And then last year, quietly, without much fanfare, many stores simply opened up Thanksgiving morning, with regular store hours. The day of gratitude had officially been replaced by a day of more. A World Consuming Itself Our world is a world bent on consuming itself. We live in a consumer culture in which the value of everything is assigned based upon what it will do for us. In the animated film, “The Lorax,” this consumer mentality is satirized when the villain begins to bottle and sell air. But how satirical is it, really? I think the movie resonated with millions because it hit awfully close to home (and, of course, because Danny DeVito had a voice-over). We swim our entire lives in these consumer waters, and we become convinced that life is about getting what we want.

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We are persuaded of this by advertisements for the new gadget with a slightly higher resolution screen, by supermarket aisles with fifty kinds of cereal in any flavor we prefer, by clothing stores with twenty styles of blue jeans, by six different coffee shops within a mile, by churches in which we can choose the caffeinated drink of our choice to sip on during the worship service in the style we prefer on the day we want to attend. As I write this, the world is anticipating with bated breath the release of the iPhone 5. On the day it is released, millions of consumers will stand in line and trade in perfectly good—in fact, great—phones in order to receive the newest product. The new phone will cost hundreds of dollars. And I’ll be honest, if my current contract permitted it, I’d be tempted to join the lines. How does this happen? We have been convinced. Convinced we have a right to the newest things, the best products, and any commodity that will make us happy now. Convinced the world is meant to provide us with what we want. Convinced we are entitled to all the things we “need.” Even if it means we have to choke down the turkey like it’s a speed-eating contest, so we can get on with the buying. And I think there is even worse news: Thanksgiving may have succumbed to consumerism only recently, but marriage succumbed to consumerism decades ago. Without even knowing it, many of us have begun to experience marriage like a product.

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Consuming Our Partners Everyone seems to have an opinion about marriage these days. Here’s mine: I don’t care if you are gay or straight, marrying for the first time or the tenth, secular or religious, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, black or white or both…if your marital relationship becomes tainted by the consumer mentality, it will be torturous at best and doomed at worst. If we approach our marriages like a commodity, we will consume the most beloved person in our lives. We will consume them in the same way we would consume any other commodity. We will marry them because we expect them to meet particular needs. We will expect to customize them until they are able to do so. And if they ultimately fail to serve their function, we will trade them in for a different product. Like the latest iPhone, about half of marriages get traded in for a newer model—a person with different features who we think is more likely to satisfy us. And we must not create artificial divisions along secular and religious lines. Divorce rates are the same within the church as outside of it. Perhaps the secular world is more proud of its consumption and customization and exchangeability. But people of faith seem to be living it while denying it. Being Consumed By Love The beauty and wisdom of marriage is precisely this: it demands transformation for its very survival. And in these days of entitled consumerism, the demand is great. For our

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marriages to survive, they must become the site of rebellion against a commodity culture knit together by our narcissism and selfishness. If our marriages are to survive and to thrive, we must rebel against our role as the consumer, and we must become the consumed. We must be consumed by love. The way our children love stands in stark contrast to the way we have been encouraged to love by our global culture. Whereas we love something based upon what we choose and what it can do for us, our children love because love has chosen them. Every one of my children has had a beloved stuffed animal: a ragged bear named Mimi, a tattered carnival prize called Moaning Myrtle the Turtle, and a soiled rabbit named Fidel. Three kids, and not one of them ever approached me and said, “Daddy, my stuffed animal just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I think it’s time to upgrade.” My children love their stuffed animals unconditionally. Not because the animals are perfect and not because there are no other alternatives. Our kids love their stuffed animals because, in the crib—before they were bombarded by a consumer culture of commercials and store aisles and toy catalogues—they were consumed by love. They were consumed by a deep and unconditional attachment and commitment to this stuffed thing. And once we are consumed by that kind of love, it becomes a stronghold against the commodification of our loved ones. Places of unconditional love in this commodified world are, quite simply, pockets of uprising.

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Marriage is a call to this kind of rebellious love—an opportunity for souls to learn the insurrectional art of unconditional love and sacrifice. It is a training ground—a rebel training camp for a people preparing to invade a broken, aching world with a grace-filled love. In these pages, we will sound the rebel call. Chapter 1 will lay the groundwork, exploring the radical transformation that occurs when we rebel against a competitive culture and become sacrificial. Subsequent chapters will provide a roadmap for rebellion at the various stages of marriage:

• The wedding vows as rebellious, authentic commitment (Chapter 2)

• The newlywed years as an opportunity to trade in self-protection for vulnerability (Chapter 3)

• Inevitable periods of marital conflict as the way to let go of our egos and find unity (Chapter 4)

• Times of loneliness as the site of rebellion against a culture of achievement—and an opportunity to become true companions (Chapter 5)

• The long, familiar years of marriage as an opportunity to trade in certainty for wonder and mystery (Chapter 6)

• The “successes” of marriage as the doorway out of compulsive progress and into a life of gratitude (Chapter 7)

Are you ready to live your marriage as a radical, redemptive rebellion?

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Chapter  1:  Marriage  is  for  Losers    

The  Rebellion:  From  Competition  to  Sacrifice      “You can be right, or you can be married; take your pick.”

I can’t remember who told me that, but I do remember they were only half-joking. The other half, the serious half, is exceedingly important.

Marital therapy is complicated and messy. Couples usually come to therapy because they are in pain and they are angry. Trying to wade into that can feel completely out of control. In the worst-case scenario, the therapist has front row seats to a regularly scheduled prizefight. As a psychologist, I keep my bearing amidst the chaos by fixing one simple principle in mind: if marriage is going to work, it needs to become a contest to see which spouse is going to lose the most, and it needs to be a race that goes down to the wire.

Three Kinds of Marriage When it comes to winning and losing, I think there are three kinds of marriages. In the first kind of marriage, both spouses are competing to win, and it’s a duel to the death. Husbands and wives are armed with a vast arsenal, ranging from fists, to words, to silence. These are the marriages that destroy. Spouses destroy each other, and, in the process, they destroy the peace of their children. In fact, the destruction is so complete that research tells us it is better for children to have divorced and amicable parents than warring parents. These marriages account for most of the fifty percent of marriages that fail, and then some.

The second kind of marriage is ripe with winning and losing, but the roles are set, and the loser is always the same spouse.

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These are the truly abusive marriages, the ones in which one spouse dominates, the other submits, and in the process, both husband and wife are stripped of their dignity. These are the marriages of addicts and enablers, tyrants and slaves, and they may be the saddest marriages of all.

But there is a third kind of marriage.

The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all—themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way of life, a competition to see who can listen to, care for, serve, forgive, and accept the other the most. The marriage becomes a competition to see who can change in ways that are most healing to the other, to see who can give of themselves in ways that most increase the dignity and strength of the other. These marriages form people who can be humble and merciful and loving and peaceful.

And they are revolutionary, in the purest sense of the word.

A World of Would-Be Winners We live in a world in which losing is the enemy. We wake up to news stories about domestic disputes gone wrong. Really wrong. We go to workplaces where everyone is battling for the boss’s favor and the next promotion, or we stay at home where the battle for the Legos is just as fierce. Nightly, we watch the talking heads on the cable news networks trying to win the battle of ideas, although sometimes they seem quite willing to settle for winning the battle of decibels. We fight to have the best stuff, in the best name brands, and when we finally look at each other at the end of the day, we fight, because we are trained to do nothing else.

And, usually, we have been trained well. In the worst of cases, we grew up fighting for our very survival, both

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physically and emotionally. But even in the best of situations, we found ourselves trying to win the competition for our parents’ attention and approval, for our peers’ acceptance, and for the validating stamp of a world with one message: win. And so, cultivating a marriage in which losing is the mutual norm becomes a radically counter-cultural act.

To sit in the marital therapy room is to incite a rebellion.

A Second Grade Rebellion What do these rebellious marriages look like?

When my blood is bubbling, when I just know I’ve been misunderstood and neglected, and I’m ready to do just about anything to convince and win what I deserve, I try to remember a phone call we recently received from my son’s second grade teacher. She called us one day after school to tell us there had been an incident in gym class. After a fierce athletic competition, in which the prize was the privilege to leave the gym first, my son’s team had lost. The losers were standing by, grumbling and complaining about second-grade versions of injustice, as the victors filed past.

And that’s when my son started to clap.

He clapped for the winners as they passed, with a big dopey grin on his face and a smile stretched from one ear of his heart to the other. His startled gym teacher quickly exhorted the rest of his team to follow suit. So, a bunch of second grade losers staged a rebellion, giving a rousing ovation for their victorious peers, and in doing so, embraced the fullness of what it can mean to be a loser. When I’m seething, I try to remember the heart of a boy, a heart that can lose graciously and reach out in affection to the victors.

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A Marriage Rebellion In marriage, losing is letting go of the need to fix everything for your partner, listening to their darkest parts with a heartache rather than a solution.

It’s being even more present in the painful moments than in the good times.

It’s finding ways to be humble and open, even when everything in you says that you’re right and they are wrong.

It’s doing what is right and good for your spouse, even when big things need to be sacrificed, like a job, or a relationship, or an ego.

It is forgiveness, quickly and voluntarily.

It is eliminating anything from your life—even the things you love—if they are keeping you from attending, caring, and serving.

It is seeking peace by accepting the healthy but crazy-making things about your partner because, you remember, those were the things you fell in love with in the first place.

It is knowing that your spouse will never fully understand you, will never truly love you unconditionally—because they are a broken creature, too—and loving them to the end anyway.

Transformed Losers Maybe marriage, when it’s lived by two losers in a household culture of mutual surrender, is just the training we need to walk through this world—a world that wants to chew you up and spit you out—without the constant fear of getting the short end of the stick. Maybe we need to be formed in such a way that winning loses its glamour, so we can sacrifice the competition in favor of people. Maybe what we need, really,

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is to become a bunch of losers in a world that is being torn apart by the competition to win. If we did that, maybe we’d be able to sleep a little easier at night, look our loved ones in the eyes, forgive and forget, and clap for the people around us.

I think that in a marriage of losers, a synergy happens and all of life can explode into a kind of rebellion that is brighter than the sun. The really good rebellions—the ones that last and make the world a better place—are like that, aren’t they? They heal, they restore. They are big, and they shine like the sun. And, like the sun, their gravitational pull is almost irresistible.

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Chapter  1  ½:  Marriage  is  for  Boundaries    From  Fear  to  Worthiness In March of 2012, the chapter you just read took a trot around the globe in a slightly different form: a blog post of the same title. The post was shared more than 45,000 times on Facebook and received over 300 comments. Most of the comments were enthusiastic and encouraging. But one particular comment thread had a potent energy. These comments all amounted to a single question: “But what if I’m in a Type 2 marriage, and I’m always the loser?” The answer to that question is critically important. And it will determine how you should read the rest of this book. The Loneliness Problem and the Dating Solution Almost from the womb, we are faced with the problem of loneliness. Around the age of six months, we develop a subjective self; we become aware that we are separate from other creatures. With this subjective sense of separation comes a sense of loss. As we enter the “terrible twos” we learn more about this separateness: we can lie and defy and this brings a certain freedom. Yet implicit in the freedom is an increasing awareness that I am entirely independent. I am alone.

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We become terrified of this loneliness. Dark bedrooms and boogie monsters and playground anxiety and new schools and no one who understands and countless ways of feeling abandoned. But then our adolescence rolls around, and we discover a solution to our loneliness. It’s called dating. We discover that our romantic partners shine light into the dark places of our isolation. Our boyfriends and girlfriends are “one with us.” And so we cling to them. People call them “crushes,” but we know the truth: we feel like we cannot exist without them. We decide this is the way out of the loneliness and fear. All this is well and good. Normal development. Natural. Unless we are also ashamed. The Shame Problem and the Codependent Solution This is the real problem: most of us carry a lot of shame—the belief that, at our core, we are not good enough. In the midst of our loneliness, we came to believe that our loneliness was our own fault. We were trained to believe that we are unworthy of love and belonging and connection. With calloused or preoccupied parents and indifferent teachers and abusive peers, we were trained to believe we are unworthy of relationship. And so this ghost of shame lurking in the depths of our soul always has a death whisper on its tongue, and it goes like this: Who would want you?

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We are terrified of loneliness and convinced we are damaged goods. So, when someone takes us in—when a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife actually commits to us—we decide we will do anything to maintain the relationship. Even if it means sacrificing our self-respect and dignity and right to be treated humanely. We drop our boundaries completely and take on all the responsibility for apologizing, sacrificing, affirming, and being generous and supportive. I think we all carry some shame and we are all seeking to solve it in some way: through popularity or achievement or by constantly seeking the winner’s circle. We all engage in some sacrifice of healthy boundaries, even if it is simply sacrificing healthy sleep patterns in favor of work and the hope of accolades. However, for the Type 2 “loser,” the sacrifice of dignity in the hopes of maintaining a relationship becomes a daily shame-management practice and marriage is the playing field. A Different Kind of Redemptive Event We sometimes dress this up as being sacrificial or loving or giving, but in fact it’s just plain abusive. And the Type 2 “loser” is the one being abused. If that describes you, this book may frustrate you. You will find yourself cursing under your breath, “I do all this stuff, and she still never changes.” Or, “I do all that stuff, and he still rages and ignores me.” But I want you also to know this: for the Type 2 loser, marriage is still a redemptive event. However, the redemption is not about learning how to maintain a relationship or care for your partner. You are a professional at that.

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In your case, marriage is about beginning to believe in your own worthiness. Redemption will look like you reading the rest of this book and deciding that, finally, it is time for someone to sacrifice for you. It will begin with facing your fear of loneliness, embracing the truth that loneliness is a part of life and not your “fault.” You will learn the art of being alone and you will discover you are worthy, even if no one is around. Believing you are worthy, you will find places in the world to which you belong—people who value you and are willing to sacrifice for you. They will accept your imperfections and shower you with grace in your mess. And as you enter into all of this, you will begin to learn the fine art of balancing love and sacrifice with good boundaries and self-respect. So, dear Reader, if this is you, read this book with a new vision. Give it to the people in your life who need to hear it. And if the ghosts are lurking and their whispers are loud, give yourself the grace of finding a therapist. But not a marital therapist. Find a therapist to see you individually. Make a courageous stand and face into all your shame and sense of unworthiness. Do it with someone well-trained to lead you through it, not with your spouse whose lifestyle is dependent upon you not changing. If you do this, your marriage may thrive. Or it may end. But one thing is for sure: nothing will ever be the same. And that kind of redemption will be very good. Very, very good.  

 

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Chapter  2: Insurrection  in  the  Vows

From  Self-­‐Satisfaction  to  Commitment    

I love purchasing from Amazon.

Why?

Because if I don’t like what I get, they make it so easy to return. Amazon has built its reputation upon quick purchases, fast delivery, and easy returns. Is Amazon unique in this? I don’t think so. They have simply and effectively tapped into the cultural zeitgeist.

We can walk away from mortgages as if our houses are old tents at a campground. Employers treat new hires like they’re trying out for the high school baseball team—miss the numbers for one quarter and you’re instantly replaced. People move in and out of commuter neighborhoods like they’re Red Roof Inns. We shop churches like malls, moving from one to another when newer and shinier products are offered.

In this world of exchangeability and transience, our commitment muscles have atrophied. In a world of customization and customer satisfaction, the hard-endless work of committing to one thing may have become too excruciating to endure.

And  marriage  is  no  exception.    

Half of first-time marriages end in divorce. The odds of survival are the flip of a coin. We go from the tranquil confidence of the wedding day vow to the violence of the

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courtroom battle, because our marital commitments are a façade. I think at the wedding altar, many of us—probably half of us—are making a consumer commitment, not a marriage commitment.

I’ll prove it to you.

A Smile or a Grimace? Watch them.

He stands waiting. Brow glistening. His friends lined up behind him like faithful penguins. And the doors open and she appears radiant and bathed in white and she begins to glide toward him and her face is like the sun. And his smile widens and now his eyes are glistening.

With a blessing from her father, their hands are joined and they turn to face the person who will walk them through the ritual, joining them forever. The questions are asked.

“Do you take this man to be your husband?”

“Do you take this woman to be your wife?”

“For better or worse?”

And, from both, “I do.”

Watch them. Watch closely.

Something is off. They make this for-better-or-worse promise, this eternal commitment of their hearts, this gutsy-courageous vow to remain through anything—heartache and a lost baby and a house fire and joblessness and sickness and pestilence and even death. And how do they make this promise? With a smile. In fact, they look downright relieved.

Watch them closely, because they are finalizing their marital commitment with the kind of smile you would wield while making a 1-Click purchase on Amazon.

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The Commitment Deception If our wedding day vow isn’t really a for-better-or-worse commitment, what is it?

Maybe when we make our for-better-or-worse vow, we aren’t even speaking to our partner. Maybe we are actually speaking to our own hearts, whispering to ourselves a subtle reassurance: “They’re mine now. No matter what I do or don’t do, I can’t mess this up now. I won’t be abandoned.”

I think this could be the unspoken underbelly of the marital vow. It’s why we smile with relief when we make the forever-promise. Our hearts aren’t actually entering into the demanding task of life-long commitment. Our hearts are anticipating assurance and certainty and the stability for which we so deeply long.

And when commitment is experienced as an event that has already happened—an event that brings us reassurance and guarantees—rather than the work of our lives, it is fatal to marriage. Because when it doesn’t work out that way, we will do what we do with any other purchase: get a return label and send it back.

Why You Should Treat Your Marriage Like a Business If we are to rebel against the consumer-commitment that is undermining our marriages, we have to annihilate our consumer vision of commitment and reconstruct the marital commitment from the ground up.

Commitment is not a sentiment we vow; it’s a discipline we live. We don’t promise commitment; we practice it.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe if we want to radically re-envision our marital commitment, we should

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treat our marriages like a business.

Or approach them the way we would the PTA or the kids’ guitar lessons or our blogs and other social commitments. With focus and intentionality and regularity.

Can you imagine investing your entire life’s savings into a business, opening the doors, and then sitting back and heaving a sigh of relief, as if the hard work is already done? It would spell doom for the business.

And yet, in the most valuable endeavor of our lives, as the moment of the wedding day vow fades into memory, we abandon intentionality in our marriages. The birthday flowers no longer get purchased, the kids get a hug on the way out the door but your spouse doesn’t, your time together is focused on others rather than each other, and your energy is given away to every other priority.

I think this is actually a key secret to the success of marital therapy. As a marital therapist, I’m not doing anything miraculous. I don’t often have a bunch of cards up my sleeve—no magic. But I do provide a dedicated space, an hour of intentionality every week. An hour to face each other and to say in words and action, “You matter, we matter, this is my first priority right now.” An hour a week to slow down, to communicate meticulously, to go deeper into the most important parts of our hearts, and to rediscover the promise of the wedding altar.

This kind of intentionality is hard work, but the muscles of our love are starving for the exercise. They need to be stretched and torn and to become stronger in the healing.

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Living the Vow and Reclaiming Commitment We need to withdraw some of the intentionality we are putting into everything else, and we need to reinvest it in our most valuable asset—our marriages. We need to take at least two weekends a year to ourselves, away from kids and phones and dinner dishes. And one date night a month. And one morning per week, waking before the birds (and the kids) to sip coffee in the dark and light the flame of commitment.

If we invested in our marriages with this kind of intentionality, our marriage vows would become powerful again. Because they would be lived again and again, day after day, and year after year.

And our vows would be accompanied by an entirely different kind of smile. Not one of relief. But a smile of joy. A smile that acknowledges the most grueling work of life has begun. That the commitment will be hard. But it will be good. And it will strengthen our souls, making us people who can live and love and persevere.

For better or worse.

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Chapter  3:  A  Newlywed  Uprising  

From  Self-­‐Protection  to  Vulnerability    Not so long ago—as my wife was ambushing me with her brilliance and her beauty and our kids were still beyond imagining—I was a young, eager, graduate student and researcher at Penn State University. And I was determined to unearth the secrets to marital bliss. More than one hundred couples participated in my dissertation research, and I watched hundreds of hours of videotaped arguments between spouses who had been married for less than a year.

And I was shocked by what I observed.

Although the marriages had just begun—the taste of wedding cake had barely faded from their tongues—the conversations revealed that every spouse was already blaming their partner for inflicting deep wounds upon them. I was confused and intrigued. These were newlywed couples—the lifespan of the marriage was too short to have already produced the depth of wounds these spouses were ascribing to each other.

So, what was going on?

Another Marriage Deception As it turns out, we begin our marriages with a fundamental deception: although we outwardly claim to begin a new story on our wedding day, we are actually entering the marriage with the already-oozing wounds of a life lived amongst broken people. The wounds may be bandaged or disguised or anesthetized, and we may not even be aware of them ourselves.

So, we begin our marriages with a lie of omission.

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Inevitably, though, when the honeymoon tan has faded and the challenge of day-to-day loving has begun, the person to whom we have so recently pledged eternal allegiance begins to rub up against our wounds. Unknowingly, they pour salt on the wounds of a lifetime. And as the wounds are rubbed raw, we howl with the pain. We begin to blame, and we unwittingly enter into another lie—we tell our partners they have caused our wound, and we lay the full responsibility for its healing at their feet.

But it simply isn’t true.

The Wounds of a Lifetime Our life-stories don’t begin with the sliding-on of rings or that first dance or the mashing of cake in each other’s faces. Our stories begin in the vulnerable years of infancy and childhood and adolescence. By the time you utter your marriage vows, people have been writing the wounds of your story upon you for a very long time. And so we carry with us into marriage the wounds inflicted by the people we cherished the most—mothers and fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, best friends and high school sweethearts and lovers.

Most of the wounds were unintentional—wounds inflicted by broken people doing the best they could. We may have been raised in peaceful families with little conflict, where the bills got paid and there was always food on the table, but no one ever expressed how they felt about you and no one ever seemed to see you—so you enter into marriage with a deep need for affirmation and attentiveness and a sense of belonging. Other wounds were carved deep, with malice and the desire to do violence. We may have had our stories told by the vicious voices of our peers, or by parents who subtly invaded every area of life, or by authority figures who left no room for freedom or choice—so you come to marriage with

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an aching need to be treated gently, or to have your worthiness affirmed, or to be granted ample freedom and space within your relationship.

But regardless of how the wounds got there, they hurt.

And the more a wound hurts, the more we protect it. We protect it because our wounds are our vulnerability. Our wounds expose us and reveal the painful fullness of the stories we have lived. Blaming our spouses is less painful than wading into the origins of the wound itself, and it is certainly less risky than explaining and exposing our vulnerability to our new life partner. So, we protect our wounds with blame and contempt and bitterness and angry demands for healing. But in the process, we become enslaved to the wound and to the cycle of blame.

Freedom in Confession Freedom from the wound and the blame can only be found in confession. Confession is the redemption of blame and invincibility.

The couples who transform my psychotherapy office into a confession booth are the marriages that find healing.

They confess the lie, first to themselves and then to their partner. Although this kind of honesty can be terrifying, they do the gutsy-courageous thing, and they trade in blame for vulnerability. They become story-tellers, sharing the fullness of their own stories and the depth of their life-long wounds. They confess that the needs they brought into the marriage were born in a particular relationship at a particular stage of life, and they share the ache of a wound that may never be fully healed, because the people who originally inflicted the wound can’t (or won’t) be a part of healing it. They quit demanding for their partner to bestow a healing word or a corrective action. Instead, with fear and trembling, they

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enter into the vulnerability of a powerless request for a graceful love.

The power of this kind of confession is transformational, no matter where it happens.

I remember witnessing this kind of confession. In my living room. I stay home with my kids on Fridays and, invariably, while I’m grilling the cheese sandwiches for lunch, the playful, other-room noises of my four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter morph into a wail of injustice and hurt. After one particularly loud wail, I walked in to find Quinn standing over Caitlin, and he was holding something pink. You don’t have to watch CSI to dissect what had happened: There was a fight for something and the smaller kid got knocked down. I looked at Quinn, and his chin jutted out so far I was surprised he didn’t fall over. His eyes got hard and defiant and his protest began. I struggled to stay calm, I looked at him, and I asked for the truth.

And my broken, hurting, lovely son confessed.

The chin went from jutting to trembling, the eyes went from hard to wet, and the sadness welled up in his voice, a soft-choking confession—“Daddy, I'm sorry, I pushed her because it isn’t fair that I have to share my stuff but you never make her share hers.” Quinn confessed the wound of a middle child, living sandwiched in unfairness—Daddy, here’s my wound, and I’m sorry about the ways I try to heal it with demands and violence.

And do you know what happens when a confession like that takes place? Quinn tumbled into my arms, and Caitlin got up and hugged him, and we walked out of the room together.

From Disconnection to Vulnerability When confession happens, the relationship explodes with

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honesty and authenticity and vulnerability and tenderness and connectedness. And the act of confession becomes an event of transformation. The shame of our wounds loses its power to bind us and isolate us. The walls we build around ourselves are torn down and our broken places become a place of connectedness, instead of places of wounded hiding. We become creatures set free to live and to love. We become fractured creatures sutured together into a beautiful new creation. It doesn’t look perfect, but it looks like the brilliant paradox of two remaining two, yet becoming one.

I think it's time to turn the verbal boxing rings of our living rooms and bedrooms into confessional booths. This kind of honesty would be revolutionary in our world in which invincibility is king, confession is an invitation for a lawsuit, blame is the fabric of politics and religion and kitchen table debates, and vulnerability is thought of as weakness.

If, as newlyweds, we entered into the vulnerability of a confessional way of life, what kind of stories would we tell a world mired in isolation and loneliness? I think we would tell stories of a selfless love and of a redemptive, healing connectedness.

So, are you ready to be revolutionary? Will you dare to be vulnerable?

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Chapter  4:  The  Rebellious  Way  to  Fight  

From  Ego  to  Unity     When the conflict arrives in our marriages, why is becoming a rebellious loser so painful? Why is it so difficult to forsake the competition in favor of sacrifice? I think it’s because of this little thing we call an ego. It defines us as a person. And our competitive world has convinced us that to be worthy as a person, we have to be right. Which means everyone else needs to be wrong.

Fighting to Keep Our Egos Alive Several years ago, a couple sat down in my office and told me they’d been fighting viciously since their last appointment. I asked what they’d been fighting about, and I silently flipped through my mental filing cabinet: in-laws, the kids, money, sex, or just fighting about fighting?

Not much surprises me anymore, but what they said next caught me completely off-guard.

“We fought about the color of your coffee mug.”

The color of my coffee mug.

He insisted it was purple. She insisted it was blue.

Actually, the mug is both depending upon how the light hits it and your personal perceptions of color. And yet they had been embroiled in a weeklong battle. Arguing a point that doesn’t have an answer. Seeking victory in a game that cannot yield a victor. Trying to solve a problem with no definitive solution.

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The Insanity of Marriage We live our marriages in this way. We make this crazy-strange commitment to entwine our life with another’s life. Forever. And we quickly come to discover the insanity of this. We think and communicate differently than our partner. We celebrate holidays differently. We grieve differently. We vacation differently. We have differences of opinion about life and love and parenting and politics and faith.

And the color of a coffee mug.

But instead of deciding the problem lies between us, we decide the problem exists within our partner. We blame them for the differences, and the struggle, and the pain, and the messiness of life. And our homes become a battlefield, as we try to fix the problem we are married to. At best, wives walk on eggshells trying not to wake the sleeping giant, and husbands sneak around like little boys trying not to get caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

How do we rescue our marriages from this endless cycle of blame and conflict? How do we find sanity in the midst of this crazy commitment?

With Each Other When I was in high school, “magic  eye  posters”  were all the rage. They were posters of apparently random and chaotic color. Except, if you stared into them long enough—stared past them—the colors collided into coherence, and an image emerged from the randomness. Something meaningful emerged from the chaos.

I think if we expect to reclaim marriage from a culture of consumerism, it will have to begin with an entirely different perspective of the marriage altar itself. We will have to look

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at it like a magic eye poster.

We need to stare past the glitz and glamour of the wedding day, stare past the false promise of life-long satisfaction and personal gratification, stare past the false hope of turning chaos into order with the exchange of two metal rings. And as we look more deeply into the marriage altar, we may glimpse a new image emerging from the randomness and chaos.

We may see the wedding altar for what it is: an altar of sacrifice—a place our egos are meant to die.

If we look long enough, and if we can embrace this image of the wedding altar, we may yet have a fighting chance of standing with our partner, rather than constantly facing off against them. As our egos die—and our need to be right and powerful and safe dies with them—we may become free to embrace a radical kind of acceptance.

We may be free to accept:

Our spouse is another flawed creature, with whom we are trying to solve the real problem of life and living.

Our lives are stressful and chaotic and sometimes no one is to blame for it.

Our partner is not responsible for taking away all of our loneliness and inadequacy.

The redemption of this life is not found in being right, but rather in being together.

Against the World I wonder if this is the purpose of marriage:

That couples might transform marriage into an entirely different kind of ground zero. That armies of married people

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might stand side-by-side and march out into the world, armed with a sense of unity, a willingness to sacrifice themselves for something bigger, and a commitment to love others regardless of the cost to ourselves. That we might decide, finally, to find an enemy worth fighting against.

Enemies like hunger and homelessness and parentlessness, and conflict itself.

Tonight, one in seven people on this planet will go to bed hungry.

Tonight, in the wealthiest country in the world, more than a million people will be without shelter.

In the time it took you to read this chapter, approximately fifteen African children became AIDS orphans.

In 2012, a record-setting 275 Chicagoans had been murdered. By the beginning of summer. Primarily due to gang violence. Says one Chicago police officer, "Instead of a bullet with somebody's name on it, we have a bullet that reads 'To whom it may concern.'”

And yet, tonight we will go to bed with our backs to each other, fighting about who started the fight, who is most responsible for the kids’ disrespect, or who left the toilet seat up.

Or the color of a coffee mug.

Let’s stop blaming each other, and let’s find an enemy worth fighting against. Let’s put our egos to death, and let’s stand with our spouses.

Somewhere right now, there is a person, not so different than you, with an empty stomach and empty pockets. Or a family with no support, and no place to lay their heads. Or a kid dying for a story to live and a set of parents who will narrate it for her. Or a teenager with no authority figure except his

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gang and his gun.

The world is aching for people who have learned the freedom of unity and compassion, who are ready to wield them like weapons, firing salvos of love into dark and crumbling places.

And in the midst of the training, may you learn that your partner is not an enemy combatant. You may come to know them as another freedom fighter, one who will always have your back, one who will never leave you alone in the trenches.

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Chapter  5:  Revolution  When  the  Loneliness  Sets  In  

From  Accolades  to  Companionship    Psychologists have a catalogue of disorders. It’s called the DSM, and it’s thicker than a Bible. But one disease is not listed, and it’s one that destroys marriages. It’s called loneliness. It corrupts marriages. But it may also be the answer to saving them. A Kid Named Lonely I want to tell you about a kid named Lonely. The kid is genderless and ageless and all-of-us. He’s the little boy curled up in his dark bedroom, listening to the yelling in the kitchen below. She’s the little girl growing up in a house with vacant eyes and big, distracted people. Lonely is the kid on the playground, staring at all the impenetrable huddles of his peers. Lonely is the boy waiting in the drizzle for the ride that isn’t coming. Lonely is the girl whose boyfriend sees her body but not her heart. Lonely is three touchdowns on Friday night and no one sober enough to share it with.

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Lonely is the growing man in a freshman dorm, surrounded by noise and scared to death.

Lonely is the new employee on her first day at a new job, sitting in a bustling cafeteria at a table of one.

Lonely is the earnest effort to reveal your heart to another, and confusion on the face of the person you love. As long as you are human and breathing, there is a little lonely kid with big eyes and a trembling heart somewhere inside of you. Our Loneliness Crutches Loneliness hurts. Like a badly sprained ankle. We may not be aware of it until we stand on it—until we try to live and love—and then the pain shoots through us. A few torn ligaments in your ankle and there’s no way around it—you will need crutches. Our loneliness works the same way. But our loneliness-crutches aren’t made of wood. In Chapter 1 ½ we explored the ways dating and marriage can be used as loneliness crutches. But as I mentioned in that chapter, we are all dealing with loneliness and shame—we are all leaning on a loneliness crutch of one kind or another. And in a Hollywood-is-Eden culture, our loneliness crutches are often constructed of popularity, sex, and achievement. We think we can fill up the lonely places inside of us with a crowd. We seek popularity and numbers. We join the basketball team or the cheerleading squad. We act tough and attract a following. We collect a billion friends on Facebook.

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But we ultimately discover the lonely space is infinite, and no crowd is big enough to fill it. We think we can erase the loneliness problem with sex. At the moment of orgasm, most people will describe a sense of oneness with their sexual partner, even if they don’t know their name. The distinction between self and other is erased and our loneliness is obliterated. For a moment. But by the time we wake up, our psychic walls have returned and we are lonely again. So, we become dependent on the sexual experience for connection. We turn our partners into machines—dispensers of “oneness”—and when they fail to do so we go looking elsewhere. We think we can conquer our loneliness with achievement. As lonely little boys and girls, we look around and the winners seem to be saturated with attention and adoration. So, we find something to conquer. We seek fame and wealth and accolades. Yet, when the admiration rolls in, the loneliness seems bigger than ever. We end up with big jobs and big houses and an even bigger hole gaping in our hearts. The Marriage Crutch We do our best to solve our loneliness problem, but our best efforts leave us even more alone than before. So, what do we do next? We marry one person! We invest all of our resources into one product that will remove our sense of isolation—a spouse. We expect one person to take away all of our loneliness. We try to be the cool kid in the marriage, or we expect our daily fix of sex, or we bring home the bacon or care for the home meticulously

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and think we have, finally, earned the companionship that will annihilate our loneliness. But if the many can’t heal our loneliness, how can the one? The answer? They can’t. Despite our best efforts, we will come to discover that, in this life, our loneliness can never be taken away completely. But the hopelessness of this possibility seems too much to endure, so instead we blame. We accuse our spouses of being defective. We get bitter and angry and resentful. And in the process, we make our loneliness complete. The Loneliness Un-Solution Marriage is not meant to be the place where our loneliness is taken away. It’s meant to be the place where we reveal our loneliness to another. It’s not the place we eradicate our loneliness; it’s the place we share it with someone else. We confess our loneliness to our partner and we hear their confession of loneliness. In this way, marriage is the place we feel a little less alone in the world because we discover we’re not the only one feeling alone in the crowd. And the healing is in this: once you have made your loneliness available to your partner, you will no longer need to fix it. You will be able to touch it without fear and despair. You will be hopeless to fix it, but filled with the hope that comes from being joined in it.

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And this is love. Real love is not adolescent romance made eternal. Real love is two souls, lonely by nature and nurture, caring enough for themselves and each other to make their loneliness tangible to the other. No more crowds, no more sexual plunder, no more achievement. Just the courage of a naked vulnerability. The grace of two souls holding each other gently in their loneliness. Isn’t the world desperate for this kind of light, this kind of communion? Isn’t this the way we learn to minister to a world with big eyes and trembling hearts? As the long years of marriage roll out ahead of you, you will find yourselves in valleys of loneliness. It’s inevitable. But rather than a valley of despair, may it become a place of companionship, and may you take that kind of radical love into a humanity that is hanging on to hope by the thinnest of threads.  

 

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Chapter  6:  A  Rebellion  for  the  Years  of  Familiarity    From  Certainty  to  Wonder    As I write these words, my head is filled with questions. What will people think of this book? Will it be a complete disaster? Will anyone even read this far, or will it be sitting lonely and untouched in the Kindle cloud? How do I guarantee its success? What words will capture the hearts of people? My mind ponders these questions and my heart craves answers. Because the answers to these questions will make publishing my first eBook a safe experience. It will turn this vulnerable adventure into a thing with guarantees. This is what answers and solutions do for us. They make us feel safe. A World Under Control From the womb, we are immersed in a world seeking solutions and the illusion of certainty and safety. Before we were born, our parents were purchasing the safest, most disaster-proof crib on the market. They were installing plugs in the light sockets and putting mouth-sized things in cupboards out of reach. And the world knows we will pay an awful lot to purchase a feeling of certainty and safety. From the moment we earned our first paycheck, businesses were selling us the solutions they create. So we have become convinced that iPhones are

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the answer to our disconnectedness, or that a particular neighborhood is the answer to our children’s education and future. Or we eat kale and expensive vitamins and we think we have found the answer for perfect health. Or  we  settle  on  a  particular  religion  or  theology,  so  we  won’t  have  to  wonder  anymore.

We can purchase a sense of certainty and safety. For a while. But, inevitably, something happens: an accident, or a diagnosis, or an affair. Or maybe nothing happens, and we simply notice the gnawing sense of unease has returned—the questions are back, and we resume our desperate scramble for answers.

As it turns out, solutions do not bring the peace and freedom for which we are so desperately searching.

Marriages Under Control Yet we live our marriages like they are meant to be solved. When it comes to marriage, we all seem to be craving a final solution—we think we’re loving our spouses when actually we are constantly trying to solve them.

We try to solve our spouses by believing we can fully comprehend their interior lives. We convince ourselves we know what they think and how they feel and why they are reacting in a certain way.

We look at our wife’s mother or our husband’s father, and we see the similarities, and we believe we know the end of our partner’s story before it is even written. And so we go about writing it for them.

We form expectations about what they will say during conflict, and we end up responding more to the little imaginary spouse in our head than to the life-size, wondrous, mysterious person in front of us.

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We even come to marital therapy and believe it is an event with a conclusion; we think it too is a process that resolves. We hope we will find the Promised Land of marital bliss.

But approaching marriage in this way is devastating to the people we love.

The dictionary defines the word “resolve” like this: to settle or find a solution to a problem; to break into component parts; to disintegrate.

When we try to make our partners less messy, when we seek a final understanding of who they are, we disintegrate them. We take the awesome, breathtaking complexity of a whole creature with an infinite interior world, and we fragment them into something less than they are.

From Control to Mystery Last Spring, I was in the kitchen one evening finishing the dinner dishes, when my eight-year-old son Aidan walked into the room. He was wearing a flannel bathrobe, with eyeglasses slightly askew, and he was holding a book about the 9/11 terrorist attacks (parenting fail?). A little gray hair and a pipe, and he might have been an elderly man enjoying his retirement.

Of course, what came out of his mouth only added to the effect. He said, “Daddy, the thing I love about God is that the more you think about him, the more questions you have. And I love questions and mysteries.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

His words ruptured me—they were truth and art and revelation, and they took my breath away. But even more than the words themselves, I was struck by the sense of

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peace and freedom with which they were uttered.

As it turns out, peace and freedom come when we relinquish the safety of certainty and embrace the wonder of mystery.

From Solutions to Wonder Perhaps, if we could let go of trying to arrive in a place of knowing our spouse, we might become free to engage in the ongoing event of coming to know our spouse.

We might enter into their mystery.

When we stand on the threshold of mystery, we will be afraid at first, because it feels chaotic and dangerous. But if we can stay there, if we can dip our toe into the waters of mystery, we may be transformed.

We may become like children again.

My three-year-old daughter, Caitlin, recently entered the “why stage.” She asks the question, “Why?” with impunity. And in the end, with dimples popping and a glimmer in her eye, she always answers herself in this way: “Because that’s the way it is supposed to be.”

That answer is enough for her.

She’s not asking the question in order to find the answer—she’s asking because her eyes are opening up to a vast, glorious world, and her questions are an expression of wonder in the mystery of it all. Her questions don’t require answers. They only require asking.

Mysterious Marriages How might we enter into this kind of mystery and revel in it? I think we can begin by dipping our toes into the on-going, unsolvable mystery of the people to whom we’ve committed our lives. I think our marriages could be a training ground

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for a people learning to revel in the mystery. Because the truth is, we are all walking mysteries, even to ourselves. If we can never fully know our own depths, how can we expect to fully comprehend the depths of another? Our husbands and wives are bottomless mysteries that defy solving, and we are left no choice but to live in their mystery.

If we could embrace our spouses as a mystery, we would realize that when our spouses say to us, “You don’t know me,” they aren’t actually asking for us to figure them out—they don’t want to be solved like a puzzle. They are hoping we will step into the complicated and messy process of connecting with them, and they are hoping we will make it the endless work of our lives.

Lately, I’ve been encouraging couples to stop looking for solutions to their marital problems. I’ve been encouraging them to quit trying to clean up the mess of marriage by organizing their spouse into known parts. Instead, I’ve been encouraging them to wade knee-deep into the glorious catastrophe of two souls pledged to each other for life.

If our marriages could become that kind of race—a race that forsakes the finish line and seeks only the messy joy of the marathon—I think we would transform our running partners: they would cease to be dis-integrated problems to be solved, and they would become never-ending mysteries with infinite value and dignity and freedom.

And we might be transformed into a childlike people, trading the safe harbor of feeble, temporary answers for the vulnerability and wonder of endless questions. I think we might live our relationships and our lives soaked in the freedom and peace of a child discovering. We might stare entranced at a spider web and wonder at its complexity. We might look at a night sky and marvel at the vastness. We

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might look into the rebellious eyes of our child and melt at the mysterious universe behind them. We might trade in the violence of certainty for the awe-inspiring peace of the mystery, and in doing so we may unleash freedom in our marriages, and in our families, and in our friendships, and in a world being held captive by the need for certainty. And the mess of marriage would remain a mess. But it would become a mysterious mess in which we can joyfully make our home.

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Chapter  7:  An  Uprising  on  “Easy  Street”  

From  Compulsive  Progress  to  Gratitude     Last autumn, for our tenth wedding anniversary, my wife and I returned to our epicenter—the place we met and fell in love and got married and had our first child—State College, Pennsylvania. I suppose we could have taken a cruise in the Bahamas, or tasted wine for a week in Napa, or searched for romance in Paris. But we chose to return to a little university town buried in the hills of Appalachia. Why? Because I think we all need to be reminded where we began. In fact, I think our marriages depend upon it. A World Consumed by Progress Our world does not value the place we began. Our world is aching for deliverance from the struggle and pain in which we are mired, and it’s rushing to find that deliverance in progress. We are willing to sacrifice almost anything—our ideals, the environment, the well-being of future generations—on the altar of the next great technological advance or the most expedient way to make a dollar. The world spins on its axis and it spins us with all sorts of frenetic questions: What’s your plan? What are your long-term goals? How much did you get done? How can we work faster, be more efficient, and get to the next level? And these

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questions define our worth. Everything is headed somewhere, and if you aren’t headed somewhere with your hair on fire, you’ll be left behind. We absorb this obsession with progress, and our marriages and families are not spared. Never satisfied with where we are, we seek better jobs, bigger homes, more prestigious schools, and earlier retirement. But if our marriages are to satisfy, they must be a sanctuary from this kind of compulsive progress. We must find a way to anchor our souls in the things we knew about our spouses on our honeymoon. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this some kind of Pollyanna-rose-colored-glasses view of marriage? Hasn’t this manifesto been arguing that marriages are sunk by exactly this kind of idealism? But here I’m not talking about idealism. I’m talking about realism. Realism saturated with gratitude. The Way We Remember Dr. John Gottman is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. He and his wife have dedicated their personal and professional lives to explaining why some marriages survive while other marriages fail. When they invite married couples into their laboratory, they administer a “Marital Oral History Interview.” During the interview, the couple narrates the story of their relationship. Unbeknownst to the couple, how they respond to the first questions in the interview is a strong predictor of whether or

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not they will stay together. Not what they say. But how they say it. The couples who recall the early days of their relationship—the good and the bad times—with smiles and laughter and softness are more likely to stay married. When I meet with a couple for the first time in my office, I administer this interview, and I look for the signs. I want to see if this couple can remember. Can they remember those early years? Have they protected that place in their hearts? Have they clung to a sense of gratitude for the dawn of their relationship? Grateful Realism The early years of a relationship are, circumstantially, often the most difficult. Early careers, job transitions, lean finances. Rented apartments and sketchy landlords. Drafty windows and thin walls. Clothes from resale shops and wine from the bottom rack. Leftovers and cheap fast food. Tiny televisions and rabbit-ear antennae. Toilet seats always up and clothes never in the hamper. Broken pasts and uncertain futures. The early years of our romance and marriage are often a mess. And yet we find ourselves, in the midst of it all, deeply grateful for the other—this person who wants to be with us in the mess and somehow transforms it into the deepest of satisfactions. We cherish our partners in those years. When their fuse is short, our patience is long. When they screw up, we take them out to dinner. We forsake the to-do lists for long mornings under the covers.

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And we are able to do all of this because it is enough. The compulsion to progress and get better and have more has not yet overtaken us. We are lost in a sense of thanksgiving for all of it. The truth is, the couples who can hold on to this place of thanksgiving in their hearts are the couples who heave a deep and contented sigh during their 50th anniversary dance. Keeping It All In Perspective In Stephen King’s On Writing, he tells the story of being hit and nearly killed by a wild driver in 1999. When the paramedics arrived, they began to prep him for transport and treatment, including cutting off his wedding rings. Wedding rings. Plural. He was wearing the expensive wedding band his wife had purchased him in recent years, along with their two vacation homes. But he was also still wearing the wedding band from their wedding day, when they were starving artists with hardly a penny to their name. That ring had cost $8.50. We might make progress in our lives. We may find success in life, and that success may come with money and prestige and accolades. But we must be certain that, in our hearts, we are still wearing the $8.50 wedding band. Grateful for the Whole Journey We must remember.

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And we must remember with gratitude. We must forsake our thirst for progress and allow ourselves to be quenched by love. We must be determined to find that place of thanksgiving and satisfaction in our hearts. If our marriages can be this kind of redemptive event—nurturing our sense of gratitude, regardless of circumstance and situation and status—we may yet be transformed into a resilient and courageous people. If we can remember that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and crappy wine and love was enough to see us through anything, the fear of uncertainty and messiness will recede. We will float on the calm waters of gratitude, and the undulating sea of life will lose its power to sicken us. And next to us in the boat of life? A life-long shipmate, the same one who set sail with us, and the very one who will disembark with us on the other shore.

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Conclusion:  Beyond  Marriage  

Several years ago, we moved into a new house, only to discover the old residents had not moved out. The house had mice. The idea of rodents coming and going from my new home gnawed at me (pun intended) day and night. I was willing to do almost anything to eradicate them. I tracked them with bait. I placed traps. I installed electromagnetic pulse emitters to drive them crazy and ultimately drive them out of the house. And I bought cases of insulating foam and filled every external crevice in the house I could see. Nothing worked. I was so desperate I almost bought a cat. And I can’t stand cats. But then it occurred to me that mice aren’t magicians. If they are getting into the house, there’s an entry point somewhere. This occurred to me as I was looking at our back deck and the crawl space beneath it. Somewhere under there—in that dark, muddy wasteland—I realized, was Mouse Highway. I knew what I had to do. Dressed in my oldest, most tattered clothes and equipped with a can of insulating foam, I shimmied underneath the deck. We haven’t seen a mouse since. Consumer Marriage is a Rodent Consumerism is like having a rodent infestation in our marital “houses.” You can transform everything in the house

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of your marriage, but if even a single opening remains, your marriage will continue to be infested with a consumer mentality and your spouse will remain just another beloved commodity. We need to find the last hole and close it for good. For most of us, this is the final hole: we want to redeem our marriages from this consumer mentality so that our marriages will become everything we have always wanted. But if the desire to eliminate a consumer mentality from our marriage is rooted in the hope that our marriage will finally become the product we have always wanted, then the consumer mentality remains inherent in the reason for transforming the marriage. Our motivation for change actually acts like a Trojan Horse, smuggling consumerism into the marriage. So, how do we escape the reaches of consumerism? How do we fill this final hole? If we want to keep consumerism out of our marriages once and for all, we have to change the very reason we are transforming our marriages. We will have to realize that marriage was never intended to be an end in itself. Rebellious Marriage We must not transform our marriages for the sake of the marriage. We must embrace the truth that marriage is always intended to point beyond itself. We must decide that marriage is not an end, but a means to an end. Marriage is never meant to be the place where we are finally satisfied. Marriage is meant to be the beginning of an insurrection. An uprising on a global scale.

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I think marriage is intended to be a rebel training ground, an institution that undermines all others. I think marriage is meant to be a redemptive event through which the broken systems of our world are turned upside down. I think marriage teaches us to live in radically counter-cultural ways, because this broken crumbling world cannot be healed by anything less than a radical, crazy love. In a hyper-competitive world, our sacrifice is rebellion. In a world of instant gratification and whimsical exchangeability, our commitment is rebellion. In a world of strength and might and power, our vulnerability is rebellion. In a divisive and condemning world, our unity is rebellion. In an isolated and fractured world, our companionship is rebellion. In a world obsessed with certainty and safety, to live in mystery with hearts ruptured by wonder is rebellion. In a world of compulsive progress and dissatisfaction, our gratitude is rebellion. In a world seeking comfort and pleasure, our compassion is rebellion. It’s Time Go. Be a loser and live sacrificially. Go. Be committed and give birth to the joy of it. Go. Be vulnerable and heal the world with your authenticity. Go. Be unified and shower the world with compassion. Together. Go. Be lonely with a world aching for communion.

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Go. Be a mess and create space for wonder in a mysterious world. Go. Be grateful and bring peace. Right here and right now. And may your marriage turn our world upside down. May your marriage be a sacred doorway through which you walk transformed and prepared to transform a world simply bursting with the anticipation of a redemptive event. And may your marriage be a beacon for a world of souls hungry for a new way and thirsty for a love that finally quenches.

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About  the  Author  

Kelly Flanagan is a licensed clinical psychologist, writer, and blogger. He believes every moment contains the seed of redemption.

In addition to his blog, he has contributed to other publications including Marriage Magazine and Ethika Politika (the online journal for the Center for Morality in Public Life).

For Kelly’s thinking about consumerism and the commodification of people, he owes a debt of gratitude to Skye Jethani and his book, The Divine Commodity.

Kelly lives in Wheaton, IL, with his wife and three children. He practices at Alliance Clinical Associates and enjoys learning from his children how to be a kid again.

To connect with Kelly, visit him at any of the following:

• Email: drkellyflanagan@gmail.com

• Blog: drkellyflanagan.com

• Facebook: facebook.com/drkellyflanagan

• Twitter: twitter.com/DrKellyFlanagan

He wants to hear what you thought of this book. Did it inspire you, confuse you, anger you? Let him know!