It is not possible to be a hundred per cent happy in marriage without a hundred per cent trust between spouses. But it is possible to present the appearance of a blissful marriage when there is no marriage left.
Multiplied appearances of happy marriages are commonplace, but then they are only appearances.
It may happen that the wife decides to protect herself from a persistent, burdensome problem, so she mentally retires from the marriage; isolates and insulates herself from her husband and merely tolerates the basics of living together. That couple will be together in the bedroom for ages without any sex life.
And spouses keep up appearances because of the complicated social cost of opting out of holy matrimony, and because of the need to offer the children psychological protection.
Since life is good, and should be lived to the full; and since marriage is good and should be enjoyed to the full, there must be a way to deal with marriages that have died walking.
It is not possible that to all of human life’s troubles solutions can be found—or at least attempted—and there is no answer whatsoever to the dead marriage.
We will do well to first of all try comprehending why marriages die on their feet.
REASONS
There are reasons why marriages die walking:
Firstly, one spouse has continued to repeat an offence and has not changed. The offence will be an unacceptable habit or practice that the other spouse has complained about endless times. It may be an innocuous defect like bed-wetting, or a devastating lifestyle like having sex outside marriage.
Secondly, there is a persistent refusal by one spouse or both to change an attitude or opinion about a crucial matter. Here we could think of a thorny and problematic dependant who brings serious inconvenience into the house, which the husband or wife vehemently defends. It is worse if dust storms in the house are usually caused by the coarse characters in one spouse’s family line.
We could even think of a permanently loss-making investment which one spouse strongly protects.
Thirdly, secrets discovered late will also kill a marriage. After the wedding day, be it days or years later, the wife finds out her spouse has a son that he never told her about during courtship. One friend of mine discovered this the night before the wedding day. The question will always linger: What other secrets have been hidden from me?
Fourthly, a spouse commits incest by consent or by use of force as in rape or child defilement. The offended spouse may choose to silently create a distance from that spouse rather than to drag the matter into the public and spill the innards. The thinking goes: After all, the disgrace will cover not only the offender but the entire family.
The emotional and psychological disconnect may not even be spotted by outsiders, and not even by the children, depending on the strength of character of the offended party. Nonetheless that marriage, in all its dimensions, is dead and buried.
Fifthly, the husband and wife were forced by their parents to marry for political or business reasons. At certain levels in society the world over, people do not marry for love. They marry to continue political or business dynasties. Husband and wife died on the wedding day because their parents’ conspiracy murdered their souls by dousing the fires of their cherished personal dreams.
Sixthly, vengeance drives people into marriage. It works like this; a fiancée jilted close to the wedding day by her lover boy may marry literally any man just to hit back at him. While she resides with her husband, her soul-tie to the first love still breathes and thrives, such that her husband lives only with a shell which he can neither comprehend nor connect with.
Seventhly, there are emotionally discordant couples. The poor spouse married only for the money, but the wealthy spouse married only for love. That sort of marriage may last but it will lack that vital soul-to-soul connection. And once the money flows down the drain of bankruptcy or bank seizure or foreclosure and all that, the marriage will visibly terminate.
Eighthly, impersonation is a factor. Down the road, the husband discovers his wife’s real identity and background. Records and other information were falsified at the beginning, and the discovery simply entombs him.
Ninthly, she suddenly discovers he married her only for sex. Or, in the heat of a vicious quarrel, he tells her he was only interested in her hips or legs—some husbands have said just that.
Tenthly, unfulfilled expectations can dry up all the vital juices of holy matrimony. This dreadful duvet covers a great many couples where wives no longer dream of what they want their married life to be. They no longer hope because the time for certain things has long passed, and the one to blame in each case is the husband who deprived her of those things girls long to see in their womanhood.
Finally, divorce and widowhood not well handled throw people into unhappy new marriages. Divorcees and widows do suffer a real need to fill a vacuum. Consider too the weight of grief over the loss of a spouse and property, and matters become unbearable.
Later on in that new marital relationship, that spouse may conclude that the new marriage was an unfortunate mistake which, even more unfortunately, cannot be reversed.
There are many other reasons why marriages die without ending up in a socially visible divorce.
But there are no reasons why dead marriages should not and cannot rise from the grave. There are no reasons why men and women created by God to fulfill life and accomplish great things should live compelled to lie and pretend their way through entire lifetimes.
There are no reasons why a select number of spouses should go blowing in the wind living dead.
ANSWER
In human terms, there are no answers; there is no hope for couples frozen in dead marriages. But to all this there is one answer.
For couples that have endured years or indeed decades of ‘separatist’ marriages in which the relationships are everything except intimate and trustful, everything except loving and intimate, only the power of the Holy Spirit can raise that which has died and cause the fires of love to blaze anew.
If you pay attention to the words of Job, a wealthy man who lost all his 10 children, thousands of livestock and property in one day, there is reason to hope. Job 14:7-9 observes: “For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease. Though its roots may grow old in the earth and its stump may die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and bring forth branches like a plant.” You may see yourself as a stump, buried and forgotten; but you are not.
The stump of that dead marriage can live again if husband and wife dare turn their feet towards the resurrected Jesus Christ. You married by faith, you can approach Jesus by faith.
He was speaking to a woman married five times before, now in a sixth uncertain relationship, when he said in John 4:13 and 14, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”
Jesus also said in John 7:37 and 38, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
The familiar watering places will leave you thirsty again, and again, and again. But the water Jesus gives renews life, and it becomes a fountain that will renew marriage daily. This is the God whose mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 2:22 and 23) and which make new every morning the marriages of those who truly—‘truly’— trust in Him.
I Corinthians 13:8 says, “Love never fails.” If we understand I John 3:8 which says “God is love,” we will realize that God who is love never fails. The God of the resurrection, who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, cannot fail to bring to life the marriage that has died while having the appearance of a long-lasting and exemplary union.
No matter how long the marriage has been dead, if the spouses want to live again, they shall see the joy of the Lord and live again. This is crucial because life can last another twenty to fifty years and all those years can be spent in utter misery.
COMPLEX
One of the reasons why we need Jesus Christ who is the Saviour of the world is that life’s issues are often too vast and complex for us to deal with.
Spouses walking dead have to recognize this reality and stop trying to dissect and explain where the problem started and with whom: human inability to dissemble the complexities of various trouble spots of the world has caused the continuation of conflicts.
In certain cases, both parties have been right in their claims and arguments, so who blames who? We need to accept that Jesus Christ on the cross at Golgotha took on Himself all our faults, foibles, weaknesses and wicked ways and became sin on our behalf in the eyes of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). That leaves us with no position but to forgive.
Husbands, forgive your wives; wives, forgive your husbands. That is a powerful position to start from towards the resurrection of that fossilized marriage.
There is a limit to what counselling can accomplish, and more so in cases where spouses have long resigned to what they see as their miserable fate. Beyond that limit waits the saving grace of God.
TRUST
Those couples that have not reached that stage of walking dead need be told that the marriage enterprise depends on many ingredients to succeed, but top of the list is trust. Without trust between spouses, even love, which should be the first reason for coming together, suffocates and eventually wilts.
But the dead marriage can be reactivated and energized if we agree to trust.
Marriage has been described as an empty box. The man and the woman should put into that box those delights they desire to enjoy from their lifelong union. The Garden of Eden into which the Creator placed our First Parents Adam and Eve is a picture of what holy matrimony is: a patch of land where the couple should plant and nurture the flora that will make a garden of such exquisite beauty which passers-by will want to visit and enjoy.
But then, this is not how people think. There are countries in Africa where it is a socio-cultural expectation that before she gets married, a girl should have a child to prove to possible suitors that she can bear children. Short of a child out of wedlock she will not find a spouse.
Here is a paradox: the very same demand for a child before marriage in such cultures becomes proof that the woman is playful and untrustworthy.
There are men and women who believe that before they wed, they should first demonstrate their love by having sex. The woman who refuses to do this will usually be ditched for failing to ‘prove’ love for the man—seldom will a woman drop a man for holding back.
Here is another paradox: the woman who meets her boyfriend’s demand for sex before marriage sets alarm bells ringing in his mind and he begins to suspect she is morally loose.
Then there are spinsters who convince one another that the best way to ‘hook’ a man for life is to ensure there is a pregnancy before marriage.
Which brings us to yet another paradox: that man will either deny paternity and flee from the relationship or will under pressure marry a woman he holds in suspicion.
The foundation on which the marriage is constructed pre-determines its failure or success. Singles should learn to seek meaningful counsel to establish sound foundations for marriage instead of diving headlong into holy matrimony fully unprepared.
Singles need to start by attempting to understand what love is. Love is greater than words can say. Ephesians 3:17-19 indicates that the love of Christ encompasses all things in its limitless width, length, depth and height.
Think about His love. I Corinthians 13:4-8 says, “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself; is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things; hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”
With that scope of love in our hearts, we surely have no reason to end up in loveless marriages which die on their feet.
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