January 25, 2007
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Building a Great Marriage
by Anne Ortlund.
Out of the all the marriage books I’ve read: when I was single, when I was dating, when I was engaged and now looking back after being married; this one (Building a Great Marriage) and another one that is written by Walter Trobisch called “I Married You” are the two BEST books I’d be most delighted to recommend. Anne Ortlund has this warm, inviting, honest and conversational writing style that draws you in, while at the same time being able to offer some memorable, practical tips for building a great marriage. (We still use those tips daily in our marriage — and it’s been a year and half since when we read it together!) Here’s an excerpt; let me know what you think.
Chapter 1. You’re Married!
You’re really married. You’ve volunteered to tackle the sweetest, hardest, most wonderful, most exasperating, most terrifying, most ennobling, most difficult, most rewarding and exhilarating job of your life.
A couple of old girl friends ran into each other, and one said, “Hey, Susie, I hear you’re married now. How is it?”
Susie said, “I don’t like it.”
The friend said, “You don’t like it? Why not? What’s the matter?”
Susie said, “Well, you gotta cook and do the dishes and make the bed – and three weeks later you gotta do the same things all over again!”
You laugh — but are you saying, “I don’t like it”?
A wedding is a little like sitting down in a rollar coaster. You’re full of delighted expectation and suddenly, vroom! You’ve taken off, “for better or for worse,” and is it better or worse? Should you laugh — or should you cry “whiplash”?
…I heard someone say recently, “Marriage is a great adventure, isn’t it? — like going off to war….”
It’s terrific and it’s also tough.
Both.
All at once.
The Bible says in First Corinthians 7 that:
1. From now on your body isn’t yours anymore. It belongs to your partner, too, so you’re to give him/her sex at any time. Only exception: during periods for prayer (verses 1-7).
2. Married couples must not separate or divorce (verses 10,11).
4. A single Christian can concentrate on how to please the Lord, but a married one has a double job: how to please the Lord and how to please his/her spouse. (verses 32-34)
Understand, then, early marrieds, what you did when you took a partner: you just permanently complicated your life. You stepped into something you can never totally undo.
Dr. Rudolph Dreikurs, Professor of Psychology at Chicago Medical School, wrote this: “Marriage does not solve any problems; it is a problem itself which has to be solved.”
So! You’re beginning to face the greatest challenge of your entire life — the challenge to fit together two basically selfish people for maybe fifty or seventy-five years.
You’re challenged to do it through the shock of unpleasant discoveries about each other,
To fit together when you’re tired,
When you’ve run out of money,
When you’re sick,
When your parents and friends say to do one thing and your spouse says to do another,
When your heart says to do one thing and your spouse says do another,
When the Lord says to do one thing and your spouse says to do another,
When you don’t know where to turn for comfort or advice….
Through all this and far more, you’re challenged to fit together.
Are you scared? Does the future look too full of obstacles, and you’d like to run? Well, let me give you a piece of advice: don’t pressure yourself out of marriage. Remember, millions of others are married, too, and many of them fulfilled, enjoying God’s will, and deeply in love — like me.
Marriage works for those who have the will to work for it. Marriage gives to those who give to it; a great one will cost you plenty. Be prepared to make huge, sometimes unfairly huge, contributions into the common pot of your marriage — freely, generously, joyously, continually — and never measuring what your partner puts in.
“As long as you both shall live,” said your vow. You didn’t promise always to feel in love with your mate. You couldn’t promise that, any more than you could promise always to feel happy, or feel at peace, or feeling anything. All you promised was to be married. For life.
And on the other side of self-control, sacrifice, even hardship, is greatness.
So easy does it.
Laugh a lot.
Touch continually.
Keep hope kindled.
Look right into each other’s eyes.
Hang in there.
Keep making love.
Stay with Jesus.
Learn the rules. (Hopefully, this book will help.)
You’re married. Hear it again: You’ve volunteered to tackle the sweetest, hardest, most wonderful, most exasperating, most terrifying, most ennobling, most difficult, most rewarding and exhilarating job of your life.
Pick those building blocks carefully.
Comments (11)
thanks for the recommendations! i was actually looking for a book to go through with my boyfriend. I’ll check these books out =) well, maybe the first one.
I like her writing style, too. She has a wonderful way of encouraging people
hahhahaha you emailed and then you enticed me through your xanga just incase i didn’t read it myself.
wahooo, what a pal. 
i did read partway through! it’s quite the pleasurable read. gonna have to pick it up again soon after my desk and floor get cleaned… (those i said i would do soon first…):)
hey mary ann…McLaren’s book is written as non-fiction, but in the introduction McLaren says it is a “religious dialogue” (or something vague like that). it wasn’t until i got to the endnotes that i was convinced most (if not all) of the book was fiction.
as for whether i lean toward emergent or non-emergent, i am still trying to understand what emergent is. apparently it is not a church but a way of doing church. it may even be a general way of being a christian in our present age of postmodernism. emergent doesn’t have a statement of faith or formal confession which makes it difficult to decide what i think about the whole movement. i am still doing research… are you familiar with emergent?
Thanks for the recommendation. By the way, I read Organic Church for bible study. Some liked it and some didn’t. It has lots of good points, slowly unravels with re-emphasizing points but not sure about the approach as a whole. The most important thing I got out of it was to meet people where (physically and spiritually) they are at – what I learned from my time with YFC. You can borrow it the next time I’m in SD (2/10 wkend) if you like. Just let me know.
thanks for posting this, i will investigate.
tangent, off the previous two posters
have you read shaping of things to come? its next on my “to read” list.
very well stated piece of truth
definitely deserves an “amen”
thanks for the post mary ann! i’ll look into those books you recommended
Most people start marriage with the optimism and idealism that I’m hearing from that excerpt. Nobody, trust me, nobody goes into marriage expecting to separate or divorce. But I’ve known and experienced enough marital conflict to know that, yes, it takes hard work but… you can’t force someone to work hard on the marriage. In most cases, one of the spouses has given up and stopped trying… and there’s nothing the other spouse can do about it. They can’t force the other person to open their heart. They can’t force the other person to go to counseling. They can’t force the other person to stop having affairs. And they can’t make the other person get right with God. I wrote an entry about divorce as I was going through my own (July 9, 2006). Tell me what you think.
Hi Estela, I agree that you can’t force the other person to work hard on your marriage when they don’t want to. It takes two for a marriage to work. This book is written under the assumption that both partners are committed to having a fruitful marriage.
Speaking in generalities, I would hope that the couple began their marriage (before their marriage) with good, ongoing, continual communication. If something is not working, they ought to talk about it right away. If there’s an issue that has grown to the proportion of one spouse abandoning the marriage, we know it didn’t begin two days ago or even last week but long before — perhaps a series of unreconciled conflicts or unvoiced hurts or perhaps there is uncrucified selfishness. The reality is that we are all selfish beings and, without Christ’s Lordship in our lives, it is far too easy to demand things from our spouse without remorse. Even with Christ in our hearts, we can still be so selfish and demanding. So I can understand how marriages get so cold, how bitterness grows, how abandonment happens and divorces result. I can understand it especially when the marriage is to an unbeliever, because choosing to yield to the other and to forgive is simply unnatural.
I wish that it was a perfect world and that even if one spouse wants to abandon the marriage, they could go back to their former commitments to talking things out, to forgiving each other and to yielding to each other — to not give up! — but sometimes those commitments were never made or are thrown out by a complete hardness of heart, so it makes it hard to stay in the marriage. But sometimes even in those times and situations, you just have to pray and wait and be faithful until God tells you otherwise. And God does tell you otherwise sometimes (when it’s physically and emotionally dangerous to stay in the marriage, when there is marital unfaithfulness, etc). God hates divorce, but He also loves His children with a fierce love which surpasses parents’ love for their children. His desire is always the best for us. We need to keep in step with His Spirit as we continue the journey of life with all the unforeseen curve balls which are pitched in our direction. He’ll keep showing us the way.
I just got your message and checked back on this… I agree with what you said about “uncrucified selfishness” and unreconciled conflicts being at the root of many marriage problems and how it hightlights our need for Christ to be in our hearts. One thing I’ve learned is how easily sin can lead people’s hardening of hearts and even believers can become self-deceived so that they look and never see, listen and never hear… and that sometimes no amount of reasoning or arguing will change someone’s mind about going down a path of destruction. It’s especially sad when it is happening to someone close.