At the beginning of every relationship, there is a high level of hope and desire that causes it to run on autopilot.  But over time hope and desire begin to erode when disappointment enters.

There are dozens of ways we can disappoint one another in a relationship as close and intimate as marriage.  From I thought it would be different to actual differences in upbringing, values, habits about money, personality, motivation, work ethic, and sex drives, we have the makings of marriage wars.  Sometimes people come across offensively because they are reacting to pain from the hurts that they have experienced in the past, and they are just trying to protect themselves from being injured again.  Wounded animals do not act predictably when you approach them; neither do emotionally wounded humans.

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Last time we began looking at the Idol of Happiness in Part 1.  I discussed how often people won’t do the right things in life simply because those things don’t make them happy. It’s common in our culture for believers to mistakenly believe the notion that “God doesn’t want me to be unhappy.” This is especially true in marriage. For many Christians, marriage has some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card attached to it.  They seem to think the radical, difficult parts of Christianity (to love, to serve, to forgive, or to sacrifice, pertain only to those outside of one’s marriage.  Loving, suffering, turning the other cheek, forgiving are all wonderful Christian concepts, but one shouldn’t have to do that in our own marriage.  That would be way too much work.

“But stay in an unhappy marriage!?” you protest. I’ve had people try to reason and argue with me about why they were bailing on their wives or husbands and justify it one way or the other based on the presupposition that God would not want them to suffer. “Come on,” they’ve said to me incredulously.  “Are you actually saying God would ask someone to stick in a marriage that makes them unhappy?’

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Many Christians have turned happiness into an idol.  I’m not suggesting God is against us being happy.  The Scriptures say, “Happy are the people whose God is the Lord.”  So when does happiness become an idol?  It happens when we exalt our concern to be happy above the very concerns of God himself. We live in a culture that says, “Above all else be happy; do what you want to do; satisfy yourself; look out for number one; do your own thing.”  The Bible teaches that the husband should love his wife.  We reason, No problem—as long as it doesn’t interfere with my golf game, my fishing time, or my hunting trip. Because I need that.  After all, God wants me to be happy, right?

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Last time I began talking about the great myth that far too many couples believe when it comes to divorce. Here is the link to Part 1, if you missed it.

Many people start out thinking that married life will be complete, total, unending bliss. That the person they married will forever make them happy…after all, isn’t that what the “happily ever after” is all about? It doesn’t take long to figure out that only in fairy tales…and chick flicks… does that concept exist.

Marriage was a God-idea in the beginning.  The Genesis narrative reads, “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” At first a glance, this appears to be a loss: two now equals one.  Perhaps it is this view that causes many men to be hesitant toward marriage.  After all, from a logical numbers perspective, if two becomes one, that usually means one dies; and that is not far from the truth. The two must die to their own selfishness in order to become a stronger one, and that can be a scary prospect.  But the wonderful potential of marriage is that the one actually ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.  Marriage was designed by God to make the human experience more.

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There is a great joy to the early struggles of marriage.  When people who “make it” talk about the early days of their marriage, they admit it was bittersweet but they say the sweet ended up outweighing the bitter.  Researchers agree.  In a recent study conducted by a team of leading family scholars headed by University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, researchers found that “two-thirds of unhappily married spouses who stayed married reported that their marriages were happy five years later.  In addition, the most unhappy in their marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: Among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of ten who avoided divorce were happily married five years later.

The study went on to say that there is a kind of “divorce assumption” in America.  People assume that they will either stay in a bad marriage and continue to be miserable or get a divorce and become happier.  But the social science data challenge that assumption.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no evidence that unhappily married people who divorced were any happier that unhappily married people who stayed married!  In no way does divorce reduce symptoms of depression, raise self-esteem, increase one’s sense of mastery, or generally improve any of the twelve separate measures of psychological well-being.  Even the unhappy spouses who divorced and remarried generally were no happier than the unhappy ones who stayed married.  In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that unhappy people are unhappy, period—married or not.

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