Introduction: Welcome to the beautiful struggle of marriage.

Few words approach the beauty of marriage in both poetic cadence and real-life execution as these: “I take you to be my wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part. This is my solemn vow.”

On the other hand, is there anything that holds out the promise of beauty, happiness, and fulfillment so boldly and yet so often delivers disappointment, resentment, and even misery more than marriage?

I married my wife Toria on November 19, 2005. I was just out of college and she was in her last semester. Since then, we have welcomed three boys into our family, two by adoption and one biologically. We have moved seven times, gone through unemployment, infertility, pandemic, the loss of loved ones, and plenty of parenting trouble. In God’s kindness, we have experienced plenty of the beauty of marriage: the shared pleasures of stumbling across a gorgeous view on a hike, inside jokes, and physical intimacy; the comfort of knowing this person will never bail on me no matter how hard life gets. But we have also known plenty of the struggles of marriage: harsh words, the failure to support each other in particularly vulnerable moments, major disagreements about major life decisions that produce distrust and enmity.

However, I am not a marriage therapist. I am a pastor who desires to bring God’s Word to bear upon people’s sins, struggles, hopes, and fears. I have had the pleasure of watching congregants fall in love, encouraging them towards marriage, inviting them to my home for premarital counseling, and, most pleasurable of all, officiating their weddings. I have also had the terrible burden of sitting with couples who can hardly look each other in the eyes, have caused each other unbelievable pain, and have found themselves trapped in vicious cycles of dysfunction and animosity. More than once, I have even been able to help a struggling marriage only to go home and obtusely struggle in my own marriage.

My hope is that this booklet can help those who long for the beauty of marriage, yet find themselves struggling through marriage just as often or even more than they enjoy its beauty. Which is to say that this booklet is meant to help all married people!

As we look at a couple of significant Bible passages about love and marriage and tackle some of the struggle of marriage, I pray that this booklet might help you to love your husband or wife, to endure with hope and faithfulness through the particular struggles that confront your marriage, and allow you to enjoy more fully the beauty of marriage.

A Biblical Word on Love: 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Frank Sinatra crooned, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage. This I tell you, brother, you can’t have one without the other.” I know this not as a Sinatra fan but because it was the theme song for the ’80s and ’90s sitcom Married with Children. My parents expressly forbade me from watching the show, but the song was catchy enough to remember when I caught snatches of episode previews. Sinatra is right: love and marriage do (or should) go together like a horse and carriage. And when we look to Scripture, we find that the gospel is a story of beautiful love for us and has everything to say about how we should love each other. For this reason, before looking at the Bible’s teaching on marriage, let’s start with its teaching on love.

When engaged couples ask me to officiate their weddings, the passage of Scripture they most frequently ask me to preach from is 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, the Apostle Paul’s so-called “love passage.” It reads, “4Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” To help us understand how these words do and do not apply to marriage, I want to share three observations from this passage.

1. Understanding that this is not marital love.

First, this is not a description of romantic, marital love. Paul is not writing to a young couple. He’s writing to a church, telling the members of that church that this is the way they need to treat each other. It’s not a description of romantic, married love. It’s a description of normal, Christian love.

This doesn’t mean that these words are irrelevant to marriage. Rather, they challenge our temptation to think about marital love as completely different from all other kinds of love. Romantic love, we believe, is something that we fall into, something that happens to us. But if something can happen to us from one direction, it can happen to us from the other direction too. We can fall in love and we can fall out of love. That sadly happens to people all the time. These words remind us that any kind of real love, including marital love, isn’t something that just happens to us, but it’s an energetic calling that we give ourselves to.

In this description of normal, Christian love, Paul tells us what love looks like, what it doesn’t look like, and what it accomplishes. What it looks like is patience and kindness. What it doesn’t look like is arrogance, rudeness, and resentment. What it accomplishes is a flowering of mercy, faith, hope, and endurance.

The application for married couples, then, is not just to be in love with each other but to be Christians to each other. Love each other with Christian love.

2. Understanding that this love assumes others’ weaknesses.

To love your spouse, or others, with this Christian love is to assume the weaknesses of the other person. This is the obvious implication in Paul’s exhortations. He would not tell us to be patient instead of rude unless, from time to time, something about the other person provokes our impatience and rudeness. He would not explain that love isn’t irritable or resentful unless the person you have pledged your life to draws out your irritability and resentment. He would not tell us to bear all things unless some things needed to be borne.

All that’s to say, Paul is describing love as a battle, and the reason it’s a battle is because loving other people has to reckon with all of their weaknesses. The person you have married is weak in two significant ways: he or she is simultaneously a sufferer and a sinner. As a sufferer, bad things happen to you, and you need help when they do. Spouses need to help each other when hard things happen.

But to bear another person’s burdens while at the same time bearing your own burdens is just hard. Bearing burdens is literally burdensome. You might feel irritable that you have got to take care of your spouse. You might want to respond with rudeness rather than patience and compassion. So to love your spouse means that you have to love a sufferer, and that can be hard to do.

However, your spouse is not just a sufferer. He or she is also a sinner. I can recall a conversation with a friend about that day’s struggle in my marriage. He observed that the closer you are to someone, the more deeply you can hurt each other. Even in a faithful, loving marriage, the hurt can go deep.

This means that the words “forgive me” and “I forgive you” need to be normal in your marriage. But what real love looks like, according to this passage, is loving the other person with all of his or her weaknesses. In marriage, you are called to love someone who is very weak.

Think how this goes against the grain of how we usually think about love and marriage. The dominant model of love in our culture is the contractual model. In this model, when we fall in love, we enter into a contract for mutual benefit. Each person effectively says, “You will satisfy my needs and desires, and I’ll satisfy your needs and desires. But when one of us stops satisfying the other’s needs and desires, or when our needs and desires change”—which they inevitably do over a lifetime—“then the contract can be broken and the relationship can end.” The theologian Stanley Hauerwas explains how this model of love runs into deep problems for marriage:

Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is…learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

We change. We’re weak. A contractual view of love says that the contract can be broken when that happens. Love as the Bible describes it, on the other hand, says, no, this is when real love really gets to work.

A most common way young people think about marriage today is as a capstone achievement. A capstone achievement is one of those moments when we conquer a vital step in life. We get a degree, then we get a job, then we get into a romantic relationship, then we get married, then we have kids, and on it goes. These are capstone achievements: we achieve something in one of a handful of opportunities in a lifetime that are necessary for our personal flourishing.

Love, then, is entered into by way of contract, which can be easily broken; and marriage is something else we achieve in a lifetime of achievements. How different, though, is truly loving a person who is weak? How different is it to commit to your spouse for the rest of your life when both you and your spouse are weak people? There’s no contract here. No achievement. There’s sacrifice, endurance, patience.

If you think that doesn’t sound as attractive as a Disney fairy tale romance, remember that this is exactly how God loves you. If you want to see what real love looks like, look at how you are the object of God’s love. Look at how God loved you before you were ever inclined to love him back.

According to the Bible, it’s not that we are always the most awful people committing the most awful crimes. Rather, our hearts are always inclined to love the wrong thing. We look to other gods, or other people, or our professions, or food, drink, entertainment on a screen to give us hope, happiness, security, or significance.

We can do that as well with romantic love. We think, if only I’m with this person then everything—absolutely everything in life—will be happy and safe. When we love anyone or anything in that way, we are loving it as if it were a god. That’s idolatry. But those other things are not gods. They are idols, and an idol is like an addiction governed by the law of diminishing returns. It gives you less and less but requires more and more. If you turn another person into that idol and you look to that idol for your ultimate hope and happiness, then what will certainly happen is that the idol will collapse under the weight of your own expectations of it.

Only the true God can satisfy those deepest needs and desires, and the way he does this, the way he accomplishes his love for us—even when we are consumed by loving the wrong things in idolatrous ways—is by the most costly, sacrificial love imaginable. When Jesus died on the cross for you, he was embodying everything about this passage. He was patient and kind, not insisting on his own way, enduring all things, even enduring the shame and rejection of death on the cross.

For a married couple to love each other like this, therefore, when you take all the weaknesses that the other person brings to the marriage and your spouse takes all your weaknesses that you bring along, that is actually the most beautiful kind of love in the universe.

3. Understanding that you will fail.

However, you can’t do it; this call to love is a call you will inevitably fail to meet.

When I was in college, I had a huge crush on a girl (who, incidentally and thankfully, did not end up being my wife). In my hormonal twenty-year-old musings, I took this passage in 1 Corinthians and turned it into a love poem. It’s probably in some box in my mom’s basement, and Lord forbid it ever to see the light of day! You can imagine its tone. It sounded very sweet, earnest, heartfelt. I have never watched a Hallmark movie, but I suspect my love poem would have had a similar vibe.

However, if we were to read Paul’s words in the same tone as he wrote it, it would not be sweetness but exasperation. “Don’t you understand that love is patient and kind, that it’s not arrogant and rude? So stop being so rude to each other!” Its tone is perhaps best captured in the voice of Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza airing his grievances on Festivus.

A wider reading of this letter to the Corinthians would show just how justified such exasperation is. The rich people are getting drunk during Communion while the poor people stand in the corner with empty stomachs (chapter 11). There were sexual scandals (chapter 5) and virulent cliquishness (chapter 1). Some of them were even suing each other in court (chapter 6). In other words, this description of love is a description of what the Corinthians were not.

While most of us may not be as morally compromised as they were, as weak people we have to recognize that we never actually live up to this standard of love. Every married person knows this by experience. You have made promises and vows to your spouse, but sometimes it feels like you have committed to a bar that is impossibly high.

In a very real sense, this description of love is a description of what we are not; but it is also a perfect description of who Jesus Christ is. The encouragement for married couples, then, is not to just try harder, to love better. The encouragement is to rest more and more deeply in the love of Jesus for you. You are loved when you fail. You are loved when you do not measure up. You are loved when you do exactly what you saw your parents do, which you swore you’d never do yourself. Jesus takes all that is ugly and broken in you and gives you all that is beautiful and whole in him. He covers you in his forgiveness and righteousness—not grudgingly but willingly, because he loves you and delights in you.

You and your spouse will never be perfect for each other. Jesus will always be perfect for you. The more you live and rest in his love for you, the more you can move in the right direction in loving your spouse as this passage calls you to.

So love your spouse as a Christian. Love your spouse with all of his or her weaknesses. And know that Jesus will always be for you what you will never be for each other.

A Biblical Word on Marriage: Ephesians 5:22–33

What is true about the forgiving, patient, Jesus-modeled love in every relationship is especially true about the marriage relationship. The apostle Paul applies these general principles in ways specific to marriage in Ephesians 5:22–33, one of the most important and totally uncontroversial (cough, cough) passages on marriage in the Bible:

22Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

25Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30because we are members of his body. 31“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

We must unavoidably acknowledge the major point of controversy here: the apostle Paul’s instruction to wives in verses 22–24 that they submit to their husbands. Our culture resists hierarchical orderings of human relationships, especially in male–female relationships. And we should not sneer at or dismiss this resistance as if it were simply endemic to secular, liberal culture, particularly if you identify more with cultural conservatism. The #MeToo movement must be commended for truth-telling. Men have abused women. Institutions have sheltered predators. Women have suffered in their inability to safely face and seek justice against their abusers. Such concerns are worthy of our deepest compassion and fiercest desire for doing what is right.

At the same time, God’s Word is given for our good, so we seek to obey it for our flourishing. I likely will not be able to answer every objection or tease out every implication of these instructions, but my hope is that even if you disagree with my interpretation of the passage or still feel discomfort with Paul’s words, the major theme that you take away from this discussion will not be controversy but beauty.

So what does this passage teach us about marriage? It teaches us that human marriages—our own marriages—are meant to reflect the greatest marriage of all: the marriage of Jesus Christ and the church. The challenge to married people, therefore, is to love and honor your spouse in a way that faithfully mirrors the love and honor displayed in the greatest marriage.

Paul gives distinctive instructions to wives and husbands. Wives are to submit to their husbands, and husbands are to love their wives. We start with the instructions for wives. Two questions arise here: (1) What does it mean to submit? and (2) Why should she submit? Due to the challenges of these questions, we’ll be spending a fair amount of time here before moving on.

The first question—What does it mean to submit?—is complicated by the fact that the word “submit” is not actually in the original text in verse 22 that our modern translations render, “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.” More precisely, verse 22 is not even a complete sentence but concludes the sentence that began a verse earlier. The theme of submission starts in verse 21: “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” In other words, there is a general command to the church to submit to each other, and that general command is then applied to specific human relationships starting in verse 22. But submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ in verse 21 is part of the explanation for what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit in verse 18: “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” We can keep following the paper trail farther back. Being filled with the Spirit is part of what it means to walk wisely in verse 15, and walking wisely is part of a bigger theme of your new life in Jesus, which starts in chapter 4 verse 1: “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”

So let’s put all that together in the proper order. If you are a genuine Christian, you have been called by God. “Called” means saved. God saved you entirely by his grace. You did not earn it. Jesus died for you and gave you a gift that you could never earn. And now that he has called you, respond to his grace by living your life in a manner suitable to that calling. This lifestyle includes being filled with the Spirit rather than booze, and when you’re filled with the Spirit you’ll submit to each other. Finally, returning to the passage, submitting to each other has a few specific implications for family relationships.

In Paul’s day, writers and philosophers identified household relationships whose right ordering was necessary for the right ordering of society. These household relationships were the husband–wife relationship, the parent–child relationship, and the master–slave relationship. Paul adopts these same categories here. The following passages address the parent–child and master–slave relationships. Paul is not too worried about the right ordering of society, but he does use these categories to work out the relationships where submission happens.

So to return to the first question: what does it mean to submit? As with the case of children in their relationship with their parents and slaves in their relationships with their masters, submission at its simplest means to recognize authority. As we will see shortly, the husband’s authority is anything but authoritarian. For now, this authority is described as the husband being the head of the wife in an analogous way that Christ is the head of the church. She is to submit to him “in everything” (verse 22), which, as Frank Thielman notes, excludes obligations which are “harmful, silly, or sinful.” Paul fleshes the idea out further in verse 33: “... and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” Submission, then, means respect.

But what does this look like in reality? New Testament scholar Karen Jobes’s comments on the thematically similar passage of 1 Peter 3:1–7 can perhaps apply equally to our discussion in Ephesians 5:

The specific expressions of appropriate submission must be culturally defined. A woman who is active outside the home or a married woman appearing in public without the escort of her husband or other male relative does not scandalize our society as it did in the first century. Peter wisely did not spell out in specific terms what it means for a Christian wife to submit to her husband or for a Christian husband to live considerately with his wife. The apostle laid down the principles and then left the details to be worked out between the spouses. The church today is right to uphold a biblical order within marriage that mirrors the relationship of Christ and his church, but it should also follow Peter’s wisdom and refrain from trying to specify what that must look like in every case.

But this leads to the next question: why should the wife submit to her husband? Paul gives two reasons. First, wives are to submit “as to the Lord” (verse 22). In other words, wives, submit to your husbands not because he is a great guy but as if you were doing it for the Lord Jesus. Submit for the Lord’s sake, not your husband’s.

Second, the wife should submit to her husband because that is what the best marriage looks like. Verse 23 says, “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.” In other words, there is an analogous relationship between husbands and wives with Jesus and the church. There is headship and submission in the Jesus–church relationship. The best marriage models headship and submission for our marriages.

This is very different from what one might have heard elsewhere in Paul’s day. The great philosopher Aristotle, who had been dead for some time but whose ideas remained influential, would have agreed that wives should submit to their husbands. However, his reasoning was much different: “for the male is by nature better fitted to command than the female.” Josephus, a Jewish historian and rough contemporary of Paul, said, “The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation but that she may be directed.” Wifely submission to them is rooted in the husband’s physical, intellectual, and moral superiority. For Paul, the husband’s authority does not come from any innate superiority but because of the best marriage—the marriage of Christ to his church.

We have had a lot to say about wives, but Paul has even more to say to husbands. If a wife’s submission to her husband looks like the greatest marriage, then so does a husband’s love for his wife. Some men might ask, “How can I possibly live up to that standard? Jesus is perfect, but I can’t be perfect. I’m doomed to failure.” Don’t worry, Jesus is not calling husbands to perfection. He is calling them to selfless, self-sacrificial love.

Paul describes the husband’s love in two ways. First, a husband loves his wife on the model of Jesus’ love for the church by giving himself up for her. Verse 25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” For Jesus to give himself up for the church means that he died for her. To give up is to die. This means that if the call for the wife is to submit, the call for the husband is to die.

How does the husband die for his wife? Not literally, unless exceptional circumstances come to that. In real life, everyday terms, this means putting your own needs and desires to death for the sake of your wife. Your selfish desires, your innocent ones, your need to be proved right, your need for enough time and space to do whatever it is you want to do—all of that goes to the cross to die for the woman you have pledged your life to.

So is the husband the head of the wife? Yes, Paul says. But how does the husband exercise his headship? By dying. That’s the kind of love that Jesus showed the church. Death.

Paul then explains the purpose of that love: “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (verses 26–27). In Paul’s day, people did not bathe every day like many people do today, but a bride would bathe before the wedding as part of her preparations for the big day. Just as brides today walk down the aisle looking radiantly beautiful, so Jesus makes his bride, the church, beautiful by washing her with the word of the gospel. This word is the good news that through faith in Jesus, who was crucified for sinners and raised from the dead, his people are forgiven, adopted into his family, reshaped into his image over a lifetime of change-working grace, and kept in his sustaining embrace until the very end. Jesus died to make his bride beautiful, and so the husband dies for his wife so that she becomes beautiful in body and soul—she flourishes, grows in grace, and more and more reflects the image of her true Husband who died for her.

Second, Paul describes the husband’s love as loving his own body, which is to say as himself. One night during college, I wandered into one of the main common rooms of the dormitories. A sorority was hosting a formal ball that evening, and people were coming in and out dressed for the occasion. I sat down on a couch with a friend who, like me, had not been invited to the ball. The couch sat directly beneath a mirror, and my friend and I noticed that every single person who walked by looked at himself or herself in the mirror. Even the people who hadn’t gotten dressed yet in a suit or dress still took an appraising glance.

We love our bodies. We do not always like what we see in the mirror, but we have a vested interest in our bodies. All of us care at least a little bit about our appearance, our health, our comfort. Husbands are to love their wives in the same way: “In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church” (vv. 28–29). In other words, this is how the best marriage works. Christ loves his own body (the church), so husbands love their wives as their own bodies.

Paul gets this idea from God’s creation of marriage in Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Paul knows this is speaking about human marriage, but he also knows that in God’s eyes this verse looks forward to the best marriage. He says, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it”—the creation of marriage in Genesis 2—“refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). Built into the foundational fabric of human marriage is a mirror reflecting back upon the best marriage, the marriage of Jesus with his people. For a husband to love his wife, therefore, is to love his own body.

To love your body is to nourish and cherish it. Consider how this might play out in normal marital conflict (a topic we will turn to at greater length shortly). Husbands, a challenge for you: the next time you get into an argument with your wife, or the next time there’s a loud silence between the two of you, stop for a moment and ask yourself, “How might this end differently if I nourish and cherish this person in this moment just like I nourish and cherish myself?”

This biblical word on marriage points us toward the best marriage, where love and respect, submission and dying, work together to create the beauty of marriage. Even so, the healthiest, most beautiful marriages still can struggle. Conflict is going to happen, and we need to think about how to love each other well when it does. Sex, likewise, is an arena for marital tension and disappointment. It’s to these two issues that we turn next.

Conflict

C. S. Lewis’s book The Horse and His Boy ends like this: “Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.” It’s a humorous take on marriage to be sure, but one that I’ve grown to appreciate for its wisdom too. Marriage is marked by conflict (and, I’m afraid, even fights), and making up afterward is a skill that must be learned.

Yet many married people grow discouraged by the presence of conflict in their marriage. “If I had a better marriage we wouldn’t argue so much.” However, marriage counselor Winston Smith encourages us not to take such a grim view of marital conflict. Of course there is conflict in your marriage, and God regularly uses conflict for our spiritual growth and strengthening.

The significant point about conflict is not whether it exists but how it is conducted and resolved. Simply put, are you able to enter into conflict and still love your spouse through it? In reflecting on this question, we will consider the sources of conflict, opportunities for conflict, and responses to conflict.

First, what are the sources of conflict? One source is that we are different people. God has not made us into cookie-cutter copies of each other. He’s an infinitely creative Creator. Your personality, imagination, interests, and everything else that makes you you are wonderfully unique. Next, put that unique makeup into a particular culture and particular life story, and we are beautifully different. Now take two beautifully different people together in marriage—how could there not be conflict? Different family backgrounds can have an outsized effect on marital conflict. Communication patterns, how love is shared and received, personal values, and more are profoundly shaped by our formative years in the houses in which we were raised. Unless we are marrying our sibling (gross!), those different family backgrounds will inevitably produce conflict, and that is okay, because that’s part of our beautiful diversity.

However, we are not just different. We are sinners. James puts it this way: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:1–2a). Our sinful hearts are bent by misshapen passions and desires. What we want has gone wrong. We want the wrong thing, or we want the right thing too much or in the wrong way.

What I want is warped, and this affects what I actually love. I instinctively love myself first. I instinctively want to rule my own life as my god and lord. My wife now has to submit to my own little kingdom, except that she is doing the same thing to me! Our kingdoms are at war.

Marriage, therefore, is marked by conflict because two beautifully different sinners are trying to share a life together. Of course there is conflict.

Second, what are the opportunities for conflict? What are the usual suspects for instigating trouble? When I lead couples in premarital counseling, I always take them through the Great Expectations survey created by Dennis Rainey. I do not have them answer all the questions for me. I ask them instead to talk through these questions before the counseling session and then during the session to tell me where they discovered differences and disagreements. Inevitably, some tensions will have arisen that need more attention during the counseling session. I have found this survey helpful also for couples who are already married, especially if they had not worked through a similar process before marriage. Here, in part, are Rainey’s questions, with the language adapted for married couples. After each question, this additional question can be added: has this been a point of tension or disagreement?

  • Regarding the marriage relationship:

    • How do you make decisions in your marriage, and what do you do when you cannot agree?
    • How often do you spend time with friends?
    • What about friends of the opposite sex?

  • Regarding finances:

    • Who is the primary financial provider in the family?
    • Should both of you have mutual careers?
    • How do you decide on major purchases?
    • Who pays the bills and keeps track of expenses?
    • What is your philosophy of charitable giving, and how do you make decisions about giving?
    • What is your conviction about debt and the use of credit cards?

  • Regarding where you live:

    • Where do you want to live?
    • What kind of setting (urban, suburban, small town, rural, plains, mountains, desert, coastal, etc.)?
    • Do you want to buy a house, buy a condo, or rent an apartment?
    • Do you want higher living standards than you currently have?

  • Regarding socializing and home environment:

    • How important are family mealtimes for you?
    • How often do you eat out?
    • Do you have or want pets?
    • How often do you invite people to your home?
    • How often do you go out on dates?
    • What’s the role of electronic entertainment in your home?
    • What hobbies or recreational pursuits do you pursue individually? Together? How often do you pursue them?

  • Regarding household responsibilities:

    • Who prepares the meals?
    • What types of foods do you typically eat?
    • Is your home clean, and is that important?
    • Who is responsible for laundry? Groceries? Yard work? Cleaning? Making the bed?

  • Regarding children and parenting:

    • What is your general attitude toward children?
    • If you haven’t had children yet, when would you like to begin?
    • How many children would you like to have?
    • What will you do if you cannot biologically conceive children?
    • What is your view on birth control?
    • Who is the primary caregiver of the children?
    • How do you discipline the children? How is the responsibility for discipline shared?

  • Regarding spiritual matters:

    • When and how often do you pray and read the Bible together?
    • What is your level of involvement at church?
    • Who takes spiritual leadership in the house, and what does this mean?

  • Regarding holidays, vacations, and special occasions:

    • Where do you spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter? How do you decide?
    • What do you do for vacations?
    • How do you celebrate birthdays and anniversaries?
    • What do you do on the weekends?

  • Regarding parents and other relatives:

    • How has your relationship with your family changed since you got married?
    • How much time do you spend with your parents and in-laws?
    • What type of relationship do you have with your in-laws?
    • How involved are your parents and in-laws in your children’s lives?

  • Regarding sex (this topic will be taken up more fully in the next section):

    • How often do you have sex?
    • How do you feel about your spouse sometimes saying “no” to sex?
    • What is your overall level of satisfaction with your sexual relationship?

Let me encourage couples who are reading this booklet to take some time together to talk through these questions. I have found that talking about a potential point of conflict—household duties, say—is more fruitful and less emotionally fraught before the argument happens than in the heat of the moment when one spouse gets frustrated over those duties.

It should be clear that usually the answers you give to these questions are not right or wrong. Let’s say the husband wants to live in a condo in the city, whereas the wife would prefer a house in the suburbs. Each one might give reasons why such a move would be good for their family relationally, spiritually, and financially. So who’s right? No one! Each person can have different perspectives yet still be equally committed to a wise, God-honoring decision. The crucial piece in these opportunities for conflict is not making the right decision, but how do you love and honor each other even when you disagree? How can you listen to what the other is saying and understand with compassion the deeper hopes and fears that often live beneath these big decisions?

These considerations lead to the third primary question: how should we respond to marital conflict when it happens? Aaron Sironi and Lauren Whitman write that people tend to respond to conflict in one of two ways: moving away or moving against. Moving away is to retreat from conflict. When a person shuts down emotionally, or appeases the angry person without voicing his or her own concerns, or physically retreats from the room rather than engage in argument, these are examples of moving away. The problem with moving away is that it is rooted in fear. Someone who grew up with an intensely angry parent might tend to move away because that is what is safe. Anger is frightening. Avoiding or appeasing the angry person is safe. That is, it feels safe. A bullying father who gets to say whatever he wants to say however he wants to say it needs to be confronted for the good and maybe even the literal safety of the family.

On the other end of the spectrum is moving against. This is when the purpose of conflict is to win, to defeat your enemy. People who move against might yell, demean, use language like “You always do this!” and, in the worst examples, be physically violent. The problems with moving against are obvious, especially in the more extreme manifestations. However, even in non-abusive examples of moving against, like your garden variety short-tempered, cutting words kind of argument, it is still a failure to love. It is more concerned with winning than loving.

If most of us tend to either move away or move against, and if we do this instinctively and habitually, is there a better, third way to train ourselves in conflict? Sironi and Whitman argue that the biblical vision for conflict is to move towards. The goal of moving towards is to love your spouse by listening well, compassionately seeking to understand the hopes and fears beneath the surface, and being reconciled to each other if one or both spouses has sinned against the other. At least five virtues are necessary for moving towards: courage, patience, mercy, humility, and compassionate understanding.

You need courage to enter into hard but necessary conversations, especially if you are a move-away kind of person. You need patience because working out conflict takes time. Sometimes it takes years to work through. We all have what Richard Lovelace calls our characteristic flesh or what the Puritans would have called besetting sins—those patterns of sin and idolatry whose domineering slavery we are freed from when we become new creations in Christ but which also linger around as we are still spiritual works in progress. A spouse whose characteristic flesh is selfishness is not going to stop being selfish overnight. God can and will do amazing changes in a selfish person’s heart, but it’s likely going to take place over a lifetime of following Christ. That means that conflicts arising from selfishness are likely going to be regular to some degree. Moving toward a selfish spouse, therefore, or any spouse at all, requires patience.

Moving toward also requires mercy. Forgiving anyone is difficult; forgiving a husband or wife can be even harder for the fact that the pain caused by such a person can go so much deeper. Yet forgiveness is the way of the gospel. God has shown mercy to us, so we show mercy to others. We enter into conflict with our spouse with a willingness to forgive.

One important caveat to note here is that mercy is not an automatic ticket to reconciliation, especially in cases when the offending spouse is not genuinely repentant or has committed a grievously destructive sin, such as abuse or adultery. In these cases, forgiveness is complicated. Christ still calls us to mercy, but this doesn’t mean abusers and adulterers get an easy pass. Forgiveness in these cases has to lean on the judgment of God who sees and condemns the evildoer (Psalm 10). In more typical cases of marital conflict, on the other hand, mercy is simpler. We show mercy in conflict easily, willingly, and fully.

Fourth, moving toward your spouse in conflict requires humility. You need humility to say, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have said that. Please forgive me.” You need humility to say, “Even though I prefer we make a different decision, I choose to make you more important than me, to prioritize your hopes, fears, desires over my hopes, fears, and desires.”

Finally, moving toward your spouse requires compassionate understanding. What I have in mind is a willingness to try to understand from a posture of loving empathy what is going on beneath the surface during conflict. The wife says, “I want this shade of blue.” The husband, oblivious to the fact that his wife has dreamed of her home ever since childhood and that decorating the living room carries significant emotional significance for her, responds bluntly, “No, I don’t like that one. I like this other one.” The husband’s blunt response hits his wife at a point of deep vulnerability. Some of her deepest hopes are being dismissed. So when her husband says, “No, I don’t like that one,” what she hears is, “I don’t really love you all that much to care about what you think.”

She is a move-against kind of person, so she hits back with, “What, are you the expert now? Like you were the expert with the leaky faucet?” Side note: the husband was not an expert with the leaky faucet, and they both know it; the comment was intended to sting. The deeper truth is that the husband is deeply insecure about his lack of handyman skills. He is afraid his inability to fix leaky faucets makes his wife not respect him. He’s a move-away kind of person, so he mutters, “Fine, that blue’s fine. Sorry” … and then doesn’t say another word for an hour.

The argument wasn’t really about the shade of blue. It was about feeling loved and respected. Moving towards your spouse with compassionate understanding means that you seek to understand what is really going on down below and to sincerely show that you really do love and honor your spouse, even when you still disagree about the shade of blue.

With courage, patience, mercy, humility, and compassionate understanding, you move toward your spouse rather than moving away or moving against. Conflict shows us the unavoidable and painful struggle of marriage. Moving towards your spouse in love shows one of marriage’s most radiant beauties. This is how, like Aravis and Cor, you learn to have many quarrels with each other and always make it up again.

Sex

Sex embodies the beauty and struggle of marriage. It is beautiful, good, and celebrated on the one hand; fraught with pain, sin, and disappointment on the other. Here we will consider, first, how the Bible celebrates sexuality; second, problems in sex; and, third, a few practical suggestions to help ground married couples in a healthy sexual relationship.

First, then, the Bible celebrates sexuality. Specifically, we note four biblical celebrations. The Bible celebrates sexual abstinence. Singleness, according to God’s Word, and contrary to the opinions of both the culture of Bible times and our own day, is a good gift of equal standing with the gift of marriage. Whereas this booklet is addressed to married people in particular, it is imperative for all Christians, regardless of marital status, to affirm this essential component of the biblical vision for sex. Sexual abstinence is not merely tolerated or regretfully permitted—it’s celebrated. This would even apply to certain cases within marriage. Imagine a wife unexpectedly falls into a coma. The husband’s abstinence in that situation is good and right, even demanded by his marital vows. Less tragic scenarios, such as normal sickness or the weeks following the birth of a child, would likewise call for abstinence. Again, this is to be commended and even celebrated.

The Bible also celebrates sexual fidelity. As Tim Keller puts it, the logic for the Christian insistence that sex is only appropriate within marriage is that you should only give your body to the one you give your life to. Sexual fidelity is part of the broader theme of marital fidelity. I remember how the pastor who officiated my wife’s grandmother’s funeral applauded the newly widowed husband’s decades of faithfulness to his wife. To limit your sexual activity to your spouse and to “hold fast” (Gen. 2:24) to our spouse until one of you is six feet under together encompasses the biblical vision of marital faithfulness. Such fidelity is celebrated.

The Bible also celebrates sexual mutuality. Many Christians are quite fond, perhaps in response to the (perceived) prudishness of earlier eras, of highlighting how the Song of Songs so brazenly praises sexual pleasure. For instance, Song of Songs 7:6–9a:

6How beautiful and pleasant you are,

O loved one, with all your delights!

7Your stature is like a palm tree,

and your breasts are like its clusters.

8I say I will climb the palm tree

and lay hold of its fruit.

Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,

and the scent of your breath like apples,

9and your mouth like the best wine.

Indeed, these words do praise sexual pleasure! However, it must be equally asserted that what is being praised through the Song of Songs is mutual sexual pleasure. The bride and her beloved delight in each other mutually, reciprocally.

The reason I emphasize this is that in some Christian writings on sex—including in so-called Christian sex manuals and in well-publicized and controversial public teaching—it’s taught that the wife’s duty is to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs and that any moral sexual failings on the husband’s part can be directly or indirectly attributed to the wife’s failure to do her sexual duty. God’s Word will have nothing to do with this!

The clearest example of mutual sexual obligations comes in 1 Corinthians 7:1–5:

1Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Note here that there is a duty to satisfy your spouse’s sexual needs, and that this is linked to protecting against temptation to sexual sin. But note as well that it is a duty that husband and wife owe equally to each other. Moreover, we need not limit this to physical desire. For some spouses, sexual activity can fill an emotional need to feel loved and connected as much or more than it fulfills a physical need. The duty of giving one’s spouse his or her “conjugal rights” applies to these needs as well.

This mutual duty is part of the broader joyful obligation to love your spouse self-sacrificially. Self-sacrificial love, not sexual urges, gets the last say in the marital sexual relationship. If a wife is recovering from childbirth, menstruating, sick, or even just flat out exhausted from being with young children all day, she emphatically is not obligated by divine law to satisfy her husband if he is howling at the moon. He can love his wife, learn patience and self-control, and then at the appropriate time they can and should return together again sexually.

Similar counsel would apply to the types of sexual activity the couple engages in. Neither spouse—though in most marriages this will apply disproportionately to the wife—should be obligated to perform sexual acts with which he or she is not comfortable.

My point in this discussion isn’t to create hard and fast rules for every couple. Instead, I am trying to draw out the full implications of how the biblical view of married sex is its mutuality. It is only when sexual pleasure and enjoyment are mutually given and received that it is celebrated.

Additionally, the Bible celebrates sexual productivity, that is, bearing children. Our culture more often celebrates the opposite: sexual activity without the risk of pregnancy. The advent of cheap, safe, and effective birth control medication in the last century has helped to normalize this ethos. However, the Bible celebrates the conception, birth, and raising of children.

One of my favorite jobs as a pastor is meeting new babies in the hospital. I usually read these words as a kind of benediction over the newly expanded family:

Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,

the fruit of the womb a reward.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

are the children of one’s youth.

Blessed is the man

who fills his quiver with them!

He shall not be put to shame

when he speaks with his enemies in the gate (Psalm 127:3–5).

Not all couples are able to experience this. Infertility, I have discovered, afflicts a surprising number of couples, and the majority of these couples grieve deeply over their affliction. My wife has only gotten pregnant once to our knowledge, which led to the birth of our youngest son, Winston. Our decision to adopt children, which in God’s wonderful kindness brought Duncan and Charlie into our family, was propelled in part by our painfully unfulfilled desire to raise a family. We have great sympathy for couples who walk through this dark valley.

It is right to grieve the absence of children. Conversely, it is right to celebrate the conception and birth of children. The vexed issue of birth control for Christians is too complicated to get into here. My own inclination is that, given the Bible’s celebration of sexual productivity, it should be used either very sparingly or not at all. However a couple works through the complicated landscape of birth control, family planning, or infertility, the essential point to be recognized is that for the lifelong loving commitment of marriage to be expressed most intimately in sex which then results in the creation of new life is indeed a beautiful vision for sex.

The Bible celebrates sexuality. It celebrates sexual abstinence, sexual fidelity, sexual mutuality, and sexual productivity. This celebration is part of the beauty of marriage. However, like every other aspect of marriage, sex has its struggles too.

We have already mentioned a few. Broadly speaking, we can place sexual problems into one of three categories: sin, suffering, and performance.

Sin. The sexual sin of adultery is, according to Scripture, grounds for the termination of marriage (though not a requirement for termination). Adultery is profoundly destructive to the relationship. Reconciliation, if it is to happen at all, requires the absolute sincere repentance of the guilty party and intensive pastoral care and professional counseling.

Pornography is a more common sexual sin. Besides the fact that watching porn is voyeuristically adulterous and further enables the pandemic of human trafficking to supply many of the “actors” in porn—two reasons with plenty of weight on their own to stay away from it—there is also the issue that porn creates extremely unrealistic sexual expectations of what normal married sex should look like. If you want to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8) and work towards a flourishing and mutually enjoyable sex life in your marriage, then stay away from porn.

Suffering. Other sexual problems fall under the category of suffering. Infertility, mentioned above, is a type of suffering. Sex can become a chore and a burden which gets heavier with each unsuccessful cycle. Sexual abuse survivors are also sexual sufferers. Married sex for a survivor can provoke fear and shame rather than delight, and this through absolutely no fault of the survivor. Spouses of survivors must work extra hard to love their afflicted husband or wife well. A skilled professional counselor might be necessary to guide you as you work through these profoundly difficult issues. May sexual sufferers, like all sufferers, be convinced that they are loved infinitely and known perfectly by the God who made them and gave his Son for them. May they find refuge, hope, and healing in him. May they know that this too shall pass and that this present suffering “is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17).

Performance. Still other sexual problems fall into the third category which, for lack of a better word, we label performance problems. Sometimes the body just does not do what we want and expect it to do. This can lead to embarrassment, frustration, and tension. Winston Smith reminds us that many performance problems can be attributed either to biological or to psychological or spiritual causes. In other words, your performance problem might stem from deeply rooted fears that should be explored in counseling, or it might be because some random organ in your body that you have never given a second’s thought is doing something weird but which medicine could sort out. Smith sensibly suggests to first rule out a biological cause by getting medical advice before considering psychological or spiritual issues.

The Bible celebrates married sex, and married sex can be fraught with all kinds of problems. So where does that leave us? Let me suggest a few practical considerations that will hopefully contribute to a mutually healthy and enjoyable sex life.

First, couples should embrace the reality that quite likely you and your spouse have different levels of sexual desire. One of you wants (“needs” may be the better word) more sex; the other wants and needs less sex. This can cause tension and frustration, and as such provides another opportunity to move towards each other in love. Loving each other well means that the spouse with lesser desire should be generally agreeable to sex even if he or she is not “in the mood”—though again with the caveat mentioned above when it is perfectly appropriate, as after childbirth, to abstain from sex. The one with the greater desire, on the other hand, must love your spouse as a person not an object. Your husband or wife is a person to cherish rather than a fleshly means to the ends of sexual satisfaction. Couples with differing levels of desire should talk about their sexual relationship openly with each other and move towards each other in courage, patience, mercy, humility, and compassionate understanding.

Second, once again following Winston Smith’s wise counsel, couples should not expect every act of sex to register a 10 out of 10 on the Richter scale. There may be those 10s, but there are also the 1s. The law of normal distribution (i.e., the bell curve) will probably put most sexual activity in the 4–6 range. It’s great when sex is a raging inferno, and it’s also perfectly fine when it’s just a simmer. Embrace this! Do not put unrealistic expectations on yourself. Sex is not exclusively a physical act with a physical goal. It is also an emotional act with the emotional goals of loving, cherishing, affirming, and comforting.

David Powlison gives similar counsel when he says that sex should be normal.

Sorry to disillusion you. But much of good sex is just—well—normal and healthy. Think about it. Most people in the history of the world have lived in one-room huts, where the kids slept in the same room with their parents! Countless families have lived in flats, with only curtains for room dividers, your mother-in-law in the far corner, or your wife’s younger brother sleeping on the couch. Or they’ve lived in tents, as nomads. Not much soundproofing or privacy in that household arrangement! And not much in the way of gymnastics or sound effects possible if you have children.

Just as most meals do not need to be the Thanksgiving feast, so most sex doesn’t need to be unbelievably thrilling, Powlison says. “Basic love goes a long way toward making good sex good. Maybe the Richter scale occasionally tops out at an earth-shaking 8.0. But in normalized good sex, you’ll also enjoy 3.5 temblors that hardly rattle the tea cups.”

Sex is best when it is in its right place—as good but not ultimate. When sex is in the right place, then it is okay when your spouse is unavailable to you due to sickness or circumstances. It is okay when it’s not heart-poundingly exciting because it’s also a place to nourish and laugh. And when sex is in the right place, your spouse stops being the object of your frustrated desire or controlling fear but instead becomes the object of your genuine love.

Sex is complicated physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It wraps up hopes and fears, biological desire and relational need, adolescent fantasies and aging realities in a complicated tangle that is bound to be a source of struggle. But in its holy intentions to love, serve, give, and enjoy, it’s an undeserved gift unique among human relationships.

Conclusion

In this booklet, I have tried to help normal married couples appreciate the beauty of their marriage while also navigating the struggles they face. We looked at some key Bible passages that speak to Christian love and marriage. Then we looked at marital conflict, which invariably happens but which we can learn to love and honor through it. Finally, we considered sex in marriage, when we quite literally become one flesh with each other, and which embodies the beauty and struggle of marriage.

As Jon Dennis likes to say, some things are better caught than taught. Perhaps we can best learn what promotes greater flourishing in our marriages by observing other marriages rather than merely reading about important principles.

I have one such marriage in mind in Frank and Susan Borman. Frank is 93 years old, and Susan died on September 7, 2021. Frank is famous as the commander of Apollo 8, the first human spacecraft to fly to and orbit the moon, a crucial step towards Apollo 11’s moon landing seven months later. A 2018 profile of Borman on This American Life shows him as straightforward and uncomplicated. He was not particularly romanticized by space and the future of space travel, and he didn’t come across as particularly romantic towards his wife. He loved her and was exclusively faithful to her, but their relationship does not come across as lovey-dovey.

Robert Kurson’s book Rocket Men, an account of the Apollo 8 mission, shows how Susan increasingly struggled with her husband’s NASA career. The fear of losing him in space or in an accident like the one that killed the Apollo 1 astronauts consumed her. She slipped into depression and medicated herself with alcohol. Yet Frank loved her and stayed faithful to her through it.

She eventually came out of that darkness, but unfortunately, in later years she developed Alzheimer’s and had to live in a nursing facility. Here’s how the This American Life story ends:

Frank Borman: “I’m with her every day, and she can’t walk or talk or feed herself. So that’s where I come in. So that’s very, very difficult—very. And that’s it.”

David Kestenbaum (interviewer and narrator): “Which is either the least romantic thing you can think of … or just the opposite.”

I don’t know what spiritual convictions, if any, Frank Borman has. But an old man dressing and feeding his afflicted wife after a lifetime of devotion and faithfulness epitomizes, I think, the glorious beauty and love amidst struggle in marriage. May we be so blessed to catch that vision.