Why Your Marriage Expectations Are Ruining Your Marriage
Do you understand how powerful your expectations are? Statistically speaking, right at about half of marriages fail. And of the ones that survive, more than half of those are not thriving at all. The institution of marriage is not the problem. The problem is what we bring into it.
More marriages are falling apart today than ever before, but that does not make the institution of marriage that Jesus Christ represents obsolete. The real issue is the lack of spiritual grounding in men and women today. No one is chasing God anymore. No one is fearful of God anymore. The moral code is quickly eroding, replaced by moral relativism where whatever is good for me is good for me, and whatever is good for you is good for you. We are in serious trouble, and it shows up in the expectations we carry when we enter into marriage.
The Expectation Trap
Men and women are both guilty of it. If your expectations are formed around what you want from someone, whether financially, relationally, or sexually, that person will never measure up to the mammoth expectations you hold over him or her.
Tim Keller put it this way: there is an illusion that if we find our one true soulmate, everything wrong with us will be healed. But that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.
This is where so many marriages quietly fall apart. Not in dramatic explosions, but in the slow erosion of unmet expectations. We walk into marriage looking for someone to complete us, to fix what is broken, to fill the emptiness. And when that person inevitably fails to be God for us, we feel betrayed by the very institution that was never designed to carry that weight.
What Marriage Is Actually For
Marriage is intended for one reason alone: to point us to the person of Jesus.
Paul writes in Ephesians 5:32, "This is a great mystery, but an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one."
A marriage is intended to have mystery to it. Not the kind of mystery our culture celebrates, but a mystery that unlocks something deeper in us. It reveals something about how much Jesus loves us, about the intimacy He craves with us, and the covenant that was modeled for us when He died for us and rose again.
When marriage is painful, it is not because it is broken. It is because it is working. Keller said it best: the reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it reflects the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel is this: we are more sinful and more flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe. Yet at the very same time, we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared to hope.
This is the only kind of relationship that will truly transform us.
Why Love Without Truth Fails
Love without truth is sentimentality. It supports us, it affirms us, but it keeps us in denial about our flaws. When someone is always supporting and affirming but never helping us see our blind spots, we can get into real trouble.
But truth without love is harsh. It gives us all the information, but it delivers it in such a way that we cannot hear it anymore.
God's saving love in Christ is marked by both radical truth and radical unconditional love and commitment. That is the beauty of who Jesus is, and it is the model for every marriage.
At times your marriage seems to be an unsolvable puzzle, a maze in which you feel lost. When you find yourself in that position, uncertain and unsure of what to do, it is in that hard moment that the choice of love must take the front seat. Because marriage is more about self-denial than it is about self-fulfillment. That is the choice of love.
How to Actually Love Your Spouse
So how do we make that choice? Two things.
Receive the Holy Spirit Through Surrender
Scripture says that we receive the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ alone. In John 14:6, Jesus said, "I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life. And no one comes to the Father except through Me."
The Holy Spirit, according to the Bible, is given to those who surrender their will and their lives to Jesus. We come in faith, trusting in the fullness of His sacrifice for us. We give our lives completely to Him. We fall on His mercy. We accept His saving power and proclaim with our mouths that Jesus Christ is our Messiah who loved us, who died for us, and who rose from the grave. When we surrender our life to Him, He promises the gift of the Holy Spirit: the guide, the comforter, the one who will fuel our love of one another. He is the one that enables us to love ourselves and to love our spouse the way that Jesus Christ modeled that love.
Learn to Love Through Submission
If we receive the Holy Spirit through surrender, we then learn to love one another through submission. Paul is making some assumptions here: that the people reading this have the filling of the Holy Spirit as their fuel for real love, that they are living wisely, that they are living a Spirit-filled life, and that this life is fueling the authentic love of one another.
Here is one practical thing. The next time you and your spouse are at odds with one another, close your mouths and try serving one another. Try a revolutionary idea. What would it look like for you to outserve one another this week? You want to begin to put the pieces back together? You are going to have to learn to love someone through submitting to them. Men, you are equally as responsible to submit to her as she is to you. According to Scripture, submission is service.
The Gospel Changes Everything
The expectations you brought into your marriage were never meant to be carried by another human being. Your spouse was never designed to be your savior. But when two people surrender to the One who is, when the Holy Spirit becomes the fuel for how you love, something shifts. The maze starts to make sense. The mystery begins to unfold. And the painful, wonderful, impossible beauty of marriage starts to look an awful lot like the gospel itself.
