Many counselors suggest, promote, and encourage spouses to be intentional in their marriage, and they offer good and practical ways to be intentional. I too have offered such advice.
However, I want to suggest that your marriage is already full of intention, and that getting to the heart of a troubled marriage is understanding the less obvious and understood intentions.
On your wedding day, you made some pretty profound promises that you intended to keep. I think I can safely say that you did not marry with the intention of becoming the enemy of the one you promised to love and who made the same promise to you.
But the battles begin when our desires and expectations stop being fulfilled by the other (for a biblical reference see James 4:1). You start out with good intentions, but some or many of those intentions get replaced or lost in the midst of your unfulfilled desires and expectations.
Let’s face it, most who marry have only a slight idea of what is ahead of them. Most of our thoughts of what marriage will be like include us and our spouse living and working towards the same goals and on our best behavior. Those thoughts about living together as a happy couple, buying a house, working in our careers, having and raising a family become complex and expose endless details that we have never discussed or understood about the other.
What started out as a loving commitment of “for better or for worse” can seem to turn into the battle for who’s better and who’s worse.
Time begins to reveal that we made a lifetime commitment with hearts full of desires for happiness based on personal expectations that were not necessarily shared by our spouse. And we entered into our commitment with a lot of imagination about what our marriage should be like. We suddenly discovered that the person we married is a lot more complex than we thought. A great and hopeful discovery is to recognize that we too are more complex than we thought.
Blind Motivations
Throughout your life, you will always be intentional. What’s important to understand is how your intentions drive your behavior. Some of your intentions are going to be very selfish and destructive in marriage—no matter who you married. Going from one marriage to another without understanding and addressing the underlying struggle of our hearts is why the divorce rate among the remarried is so high.
Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth century French mathematician and philosopher, said it this way, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.” What this wise statement points to is the unstated and strangely unrealized reasons we do the good and the bad that we do.
Committing to love another person and then verbally assaulting them or withdrawing your love from them come with dark motives that can be hidden even from yourself.
This blindness to our underlying motivations is at the very heart of what Jesus has come to rescue us from. It is the very thing that keeps us from loving others well and selflessly.
Couples can find themselves in what feels like a pretty dire situation by going through years of a cycle of action and reaction. Confusion and hopelessness can set in because we neither feel understood nor do we understand the other one clearly. Furthermore, seeing ourselves clearly and understanding our actions without help is almost impossible. Should we really be surprised at the struggle we find in marriage when every married person is married to a broken person who needs to be rescued from living a life of self-interest?
You Need More Than Techniques
Don’t let the hidden agendas of the heart continue to keep you from experiencing the satisfying and meaningful marriage that God intended you to have. If you find yourself blindly searching for answers, feeling hopeless and confused about how to have the loving marriage you can have, it may be time to seek help from someone who will not just offer you new techniques on how to improve your marriage, because that will simply not do. It may be time to understand what is hijacking you and your spouse’s hearts from growing in the ability to love each other well.
One final word: finding the fear-filled, selfish agendas of the heart is only part of the work in building a good and satisfying marriage. The hardest work is learning to address those agendas in a meaningful way. A biblical counselor is trained to ask the questions that will reveal the struggles that can keep you from having what God has intended for your marriage. As the agendas of the heart are understood, the gospel provides clear ways for change to happen. God is always at work in the hearts of His children to help them live for more, instead of the “less” we often live in.
If your marriage has been on a destructive repeat cycle, or you feel you are slowly losing your connection with your spouse, don’t wait any longer because it will not get better on its own. Reach out and get the help of a trained biblical counselor today.