Anonymous Asks (284)

“Is it inauthentic or dishonest for two Christians to remain married when they don’t get along?”

It is simply a sad fact of life that not every Christian enjoys the company of every other Christian at every moment. Almost everyone grinds our gears in one way or another. As soon as the honeymoon is over (and sometimes before), you will find out things about your partner you didn’t know and don’t like. Put two very different believers under the same roof, bind them legally and spiritually to one another, and you have a recipe for persistent unhappiness when one or both behave unbiblically.

It is difficult to hide chronic unhappiness even if you are prepared to make the effort. Friends and family members who detect problems in a Christian marriage may not comment on it to the parties involved, but it’s hard to miss a wife’s snide dig at her husband, or a husband’s thinly-veiled annoyance at overhearing it. Wouldn’t it just be more honest for two people who don’t get along to part ways peacefully than to cultivate the appearance of wedded bliss while grinding their teeth when nobody is looking?

Well, no.

“Authenticity” and Airing the Dirt

Firstly, nobody is entitled to hear all the dirt about your marriage. That is not honesty or authenticity. Married Christians who constantly carp about their partners to friends and family are exceedingly unwise. Putting our feelings into words has the effect of concretizing them, making them harder to shake off even when we know we should. The proper response to a spouse whose conduct rises to the level of sinfulness is to take the issue to him or her directly with a view to minimizing the damage, solving the immediate problem and dealing with issues as they arise rather than turning them into long-standing grudges. Whining about one’s spouse to others instead is not “authentic” or “honest”, it merely means you are a disloyal gossip acting inconsistently with your faith. When my late aunt came home crying after the honeymoon, Grandma sagely turned her around and pointed her straight back to her new hubby. “You married him,” she said. She didn’t even want to hear her daughter’s complaints, and good for her. All Christians should be so prudent.

Nothing in scripture suggests we are morally bound to display every emotion we have to the world or risk being inauthentic. Both Old and New Testaments warn us about speaking too much, not about speaking too little. “The mouths of fools pour out folly,” says the Proverb. “A man of understanding remains silent.” “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.” Dishonesty is failing to tell the truth to a person to whom the truth is owed. Nobody is “owed” your version of the problems in your marriage (which may or may not reflect reality), and little is gained by sharing it when the situation is anything less than desperate. Even then, complaints about one’s marriage should only be shared in private with someone qualified to offer sound, biblical advice with a view to solving the problems, not among friends and family members with a view to mustering support for an early exit. Honesty is not the same as lacking boundaries or failing to tame the tongue.

The Appearance of Wedded Bliss

Secondly, it is both unwise and completely unnecessary to deliberately cultivate the appearance of wedded bliss. Just as nothing in scripture demands we blurt out every feeling we have, nothing in scripture encourages us to pretend to be something we are not. That is hypocrisy. What scripture demands of a wife and husband is actually very simple: that the husband love his wife and the wife respect her husband. Neither requires I feel like it, and neither is conditional on my needs being met. Each party in a marriage is responsible directly to the Lord for his or her own behavior toward the other.

As far as the world or the greater Christian community are concerned, a husband’s treatment of his wife should be considerate, and a wife’s treatment of her husband should be respectful. Consideration and respect do not require public displays of affection, cheesy smiles or fake-togetherness that might lead onlookers to form inflated impressions about the state of your marriage. What’s appropriate in public is basic decency to one another. After all, followers of Christ are to show love even to their enemies. Every Christian ought to be able to make that effort without being in any way fake or inauthentic.

Authentic to Our Commitment

Finally, the world has much to say to us about being authentic to our feelings. Scripture, on the other hand, demands we be authentic to our commitments. Most married Christian couples have taken a vow before God to love and cherish their spouse as long as they both live, or words to that effect, and God has made them one flesh. Our job is to be authentic to our word, not our emotions. “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.” A couple that has difficulty getting along is to be greatly commended when each puts aside any expectation of short-term satisfaction in order to fulfill his or her responsibility to the other, their responsibility to God, their responsibility to maintain a good testimony before the world, and their commitment to building long-term unity through continued faithfulness to their biblical obligations.

We may not always be able to say that following Christ sacrificially in our marriages makes us happy or content at every moment. Still, we ought to be living proof that by the Lord’s grace, he enables his children to love the unlovely and to impose a will strengthened by the Holy Spirit on fleshly impulses that come and go, and to which we owe nothing.