While “love” is something many people think they fall into, studies show that divorce is something we usually grow into. when marital satisfaction reaches a crisis point, the problem isn’t the person we married, but our lack of skills in the art of marriage. We don’t know how to reconnect, we fail to listen to each other, we grow callous instead of empathetic. All of these things can be developed; we can change them, and in doing so, change the marriage, without changing partners. Marriage all but demands that we grow, and a lot of us either resent the implication that we need to grow or are too lazy to work towards personal growth. When “soft issues” are the problem, divorce is a very ineffective shortcut. Divorce won’t increase our relational skills, and it won’t solve what led to the destruction of our first marriage. It’ll just put off the day of reckoning that we need to grow in certain areas. • Instead of finding a new spouse, we need to learn new ways to express empathy. Instead of getting a divorce, we need to get rid of laziness. Instead of cataloguing our spouse’s shortcomings, we need to learn the art of forgiveness. Instead of searching for a new partner, we need to search for ways we can stay connected. If you don’t address the lack of relational skills that caused the first marriage to fail, the second one will, too—because, again, the problem isn’t who you chose to marry; the problem is the lack of your relational skills (“soft” skills instead of “hard”). Unfortunately, our assumption is all too often that our spouse is insufficient; therefore, the only logical solution is to get a new spouse. If we assume that our skill set is insufficient, that there are things we need to learn about not becoming lazy in our relationship, practicing empathy, growing in humility, generosity, forgiveness and gratefulness, then we’ll see marital dissatisfaction as a call to grow deeper in holiness rather than a call to dissolve our family. The clear teaching of this study is that persistent character weaknesses—laziness, arrogance, pride, selfishness, bitterness, a sense of entitlement, and so on—kill far more marriages than active affairs, chemical dependency, physical abuse or abandonment. The answer isn’t pursuing “happiness;” it’s pursuing righteousness. • By Allaah’s grace, we can grow in each of these areas. Doesn’t this make sense? What if we assumed marriage dissatisfaction is usually an issue of character, not mismatching, and thus began working on ourselves instead of getting rid of our spouse and trying to find a new one? What if, indeed, we found marriage as a call to righteousness [ threading on the straight path] more than happiness, and then discovered that in the pursuit of righteousness we actually achieved a level of happiness we never thought possible?....... #Marriage
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 09:06:19 +0000
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