Rebecca didn’t need a shrink. At least, she hoped not. She didn’t have the time nor the inclination to bare her soul, take stock of the mess it might reveal, and try to set a whole new course. No, Rebecca had breakfast to fix, a kid to feed and clothe, and her own outfit to choose. And she had a husband to love, care for, celebrate in their better moments, tolerate in their harder moments, and generally thank for sharing life. Rebecca couldn’t even tell exactly why she was thinking so much about her marriage, although she had some hints. She didn’t want to think any more deeply, though. She wasn’t going to go down that road of no return. She’d seen it too often. Rebecca just wanted a little encouragement, maybe a few practical tips and some clear-headed thought. No shrink, just life hacks, but for marriage. She laughed at the thought. Was there such a thing?!
Guidance
Sometimes, you just need guidance. Guidance differs from counseling or therapy. In guidance, you don’t put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and ruminate over your childhood’s emotional injuries, to unwind the embedded distortions of your soul. Doing so is all well and good. Learn from therapy and counseling. Unburden yourself of years of seeing the world the wrong way. Get to the root of your issues. See yourself and others more clearly. But for now, here, just look at some shorter-term realities, for a little help navigating some more-practical realities about marriage. You have a life to lead, of which marriage is or could be a very big part. You have decisions to make and routines to reshape. You have goals to set, conflicts to resolve, stress to manage, and joys to celebrate. That’s the nature of this guide. Sometimes the depth of the subject is right in front of you, not in the profound but in the mundane. Marriage. Let’s look at it together.
Practical
A guide for marriage should be practical in its view. In one respect, marriage requires working out not just the big things like children, careers, and household support but also every little detail, like who folds the laundry and empties the dishwasher. You learn about marriage not by grand theory but instead by looking closely at the ordinary realities of it. Indeed, looking closely at the ordinary, real, and practical things may be the way that we learn about anything, even profound things like the meaning of life. The great scientific discoveries are often not so much deduced from grand principles but revealed from minute accidents. Let’s look at the ordinary world of marriage together, including its minute accidents, to see what we can learn. Take as a theme of this guide that the small stresses and accidents of marriage come to us as gifts to reveal its deeper purpose and deepest meaning.
Deductive
We can also learn how to improve our marriage by deduction, by a sort of brute force of reasoning. Some truths and practicalities are just obvious. We can work out some things about marriage from those truths and practicalities. Thinking clearly about your marriage can help. We have minds for a reason, to reason with them. Let’s put in place a structure and hierarchy of thought about your marriage, so that you have a sound framework within which to make some necessary decisions. Yet leave some room in that framework for truth to reveal itself. The frameworks we build can be rickety. Indeed, if you’re facing certain challenges in your marriage, as we all do, it may be more the result of defects in the framework of rules, customs, and expectations you or your spouse have imposed for your marriage. You may need to look at the happy accidents of your marriage to see how you need to adjust your framework. The point is to think about your marriage and to deduce things, as this guide urges.
Needs
We can also learn how to improve our marriage by understanding and meeting one another’s needs within the marriage. As biological beings, we have basic physiological needs to meet such as to eat, drink, and sleep, which a household can take as its most essential function. Safe and sound shelter, with nutritious food and ample clean clothing, makes a good start. As social beings, we have basic psychological needs to meet to live within a web of stable, supportive, and caring relationships. As spiritual beings, we have basic ontological needs to meet to make meaning and pursue purpose through our lives. One can learn a lot about one’s marriage by studying these forms and levels of need to see how they integrate with one another and what tension that integration might create and gaps that integration might leave, as this guide urges.
Principles
We should also want to behave in our marriage in a principled manner. Given our slightly irrational, largely self-interested nature, just thinking things through in answer to needs, as above, is not enough. We need principled thinking, or selfishness, hedonism, and satisfying drives of the flesh and pleasing whims of the moment will naturally take over. As corporeal beings, we first respond to the senses, to meet immediate needs. But a life of answering one’s own urges is a disparate life, one that won’t serve and sustain a spouse so well. And a life devoted to answering one’s spouse’s urges, when one’s spouse isn’t living in line with any particular principles, can be an exhausting life. Principles draw us a step away from those urges and into sustainable marital relationships. And so this guide points to principles like wanting to give to one’s spouse more than one expects to receive, putting the welfare of one’s spouse first, and promptly addressing and trying to fairly resolve issues before they fester.
Symbolic
This guide would thus make a good start by offering practical advice for thinking through one’s marital opportunities and issues in a principled fashion, while recognizing the marital partners’ complex needs. Yet doing all that would only be a start, while leaving out the most important part. To think only of one another without also thinking, and first thinking, of the marriage misses much or all of a marriage’s point. Marriage isn’t primarily about meeting one another’s needs. Marriage is instead an institution beyond its parts. Marriage is a fractal representation of a good creation, better creation structure, even better creation account, and best loving creator themselves. Making the most of one’s marriage requires living in resonance with that wonderful structure and account. Marriage represents and acts out how and for what purpose creation came together, revealed in the grand story, supreme life, and loving nature of the creator himself, as in and the two, under the sanction of the third, became one. This guide would do much better to suggest how marriage holds that precious hope.
Sacred
One hears that marriage is not just a practical, principled, and symbolic union but also a sacred institution. Marriage constitutes something set apart or otherworldly, in line with other sacraments like baptism and communion, through which we receive the divine. Marriage can indeed be heaven’s conduit, and in more ways than one. Marriage can at times be heavenly. In a good marriage, it often is, pouring out blessings hour by hour, day by day, and season by season. At other times, marriage can press so hard upon the selfish self as to squeeze confession from it, drawing out another sacrament. Indeed, marriage is the sacred institution through which we bring new life into the world and sustain it, which is as divine an act as humans may conceive, intending the pun. Wonder upon wonders, so a good marriage can be. This guide would do best to suggest how marriage holds that highest hope.
Experience
We all have our experiences with marriage, whether of our own marriage or the marriages of our parents, grandparents, siblings, children, or friends. Beyond that, including in my case a marriage of nearly fifty years, I am not a marriage counselor. My somewhat unusual experience of marriage, though, does include having as a lawyer represented many clients in separations, divorces, family businesses, estate plans, and serious injuries and even deaths of spouses, involving a lot of marital counsel. Over a long career, I have also represented and counseled many more clients regarding various other issues related to marriage, including prenuptial agreements, paternity of children inside and outside the marriage, sexual diseases transmitted between spouses due to infidelities outside the marriage, child custody after one spouse murdered the other spouse, fire insurance recovery by one spouse after alleged arson by the other spouse, and life insurance recovery after one spouse’s murder of the other spouse. I have also helped spouses prepare estate plans, probate the estate of a deceased spouse, and prove the economic and non-economic losses in the wrongful death of a spouse. It’s a wild world out there, and my law practice pulled back the curtain on a lot of bizarre and profound marital issues. This guide shares some hard-drawn insights.
Transmission
Yet this guide isn’t in any significant sense a unique, individual, or subjective account of better or best marriages. Any such claim would be ridiculously presumptive. Indeed, this guide probably contains nothing unique or original. Nor should it. You would do far better if this guide instead reminded you of ancient, traditional, and time-tested conceptions of marriage and its meaning, purpose, and best principles. We don’t so much form, refine, and express our subjective experience of the world as receive and inherit traditional, sociological, and spiritual understandings, through language, culture, customs, philosophy, and the one thing that binds all other things together, which is religion. You don’t need my two cents on marriage. You need to align your thinking about marriage, and your necessarily ritualistic practices within marriage, with the deeper patterns that form and guide the world. You would have a very good result indeed if this guide to any degree helped you do so.
Care
This guide’s overarching goal, though, is simply to demonstrate again that the creator fills the world with a yearning care for you, your spouse, and your marriage. The song of the world isn’t sadness, strife, or hardship, although the world holds plenty of it. The world’s resounding song is instead a groan of desire that you hold tightly to the rich hope of overcoming the world’s sadness, strife, and hardship, knowing that in doing so you and your spouse and marriage will prevail over the very worst of it, indeed over death itself, to attain the brightest reflection of the creator’s own glory. You, your spouse, and your marriage are divine entities the creator made in his own image. This guide urges that you keep that perspective in mind and sight, above and beyond any other sound advice this guide may offer. And if that’s enough for you, read on with the goal not only of improving your marriage but of seeing how your marriage gives you the very taste, touch, and song of heaven.
Reflection
On a scale of one to ten, how open would you rate yourself to listening carefully to, and when appropriate accepting, another’s guidance? Do you need to adjust how willing you are to seek and consider another’s views on marriage? On what subject do you most need practical advice about your marriage? Consider returning to this guide’s table of contents to find the chapter where you could find that advice. Do you have rationales and reasons for your marriage? Or goals, aspirations, and ambitions? Would you find it better to discern some aspirations or better to let go of some aspirations in favor of others? Do you behave in a principled manner toward your marriage? Can you articulate some of those principles? Do you view marriage as having a sacred or symbolic value? If so, how would you articulate that value? Would you consider discussing it with your spouse while seeing what your spouse discerns? Do marital customs and traditions sustain or interfere with your marriage? Do you have customs or traditions you’d like to adopt or jettison? What is your deep hope for your marriage?
Key Points
Guidance, while not marriage counseling, can still help a marriage.
Guidance should give practical advice for improving a marriage.
Guidance should give you rationales and reasons for a sound marriage.
Guidance should help you meet one another’s needs in marriage.
Guidance should remind you of sound principles for a marriage.
Guidance could best remind of marriage’s symbolic and sacred nature.
This guide relies on a seasoned lawyer’s peculiar insight into marriage.
This guide transmits ancient, traditional, and time-tested insights.
Deep hope exists for you, your spouse, and your marriage.