Why the Best Marriages are Made of the Best Fighters

CELIBACY is not how most roll, but it truly is a gift — to happily live the single life. Again, it’s not a gift if it’s not intrinsically our thing. Gifts that God gives require no effort on our behalf to be added to them. And life could be purposed in the knowledge, acquisition and acceptance of the gifts we are given (and we all are given gifts from the Lord.)

Why so much talk of gifts in an article about marriage? Well, it’s actually the topic “celibacy” that’s important — to launch from. Biblically, God gave us marriage for one main reason; we are alone otherwise. If we have the gift of celibacy we are happily alone. But with marriage we have partnered with someone we can love, and together we meet each other’s loneliness needs — or that’s the theory; a less than perfect theory.

Researching same-sex marriage taught me one thing about marriage — it’s a troubled institution, and anyone who disagrees is either lying or they have been gifted (them and their partner) with something all married couples should know about.

What these people and couples have going for them is this:

1)    they are willing to fight for their marriage;

2)    they are willing to fight fairly with each other; and,

3)    they are willing to fight with a never-say-die attitude in the midst of horrible loss.

At times, couples are called to fight these three ways simultaneously!

And such a way of fighting — passionately, persuasively, but inherently together — there is a wonderful legacy: a couple suchlike will be a model couple.

We might argue that a couple who will not fight in these ways has no right to be married at all; that the single life is what calls them. But horrible it is when we are content with neither life.

Notwithstanding, the best marriages are made of fighters.

(This has nothing to do with those odious husbands who beat their wives — that’s not fighting, for fighting requires two evenly pitched protagonists.)

If we are married and we are passionate about our marriage — in our own way, for some passion is born in grounded and less felt ways — and we fight fairly, and we are prepared to fight through loss, our marriage has everything.

Again, marriage has everything when we fight for the marriage, when we fight fairly, and when we fight through loss into healing.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.