Carla had a big decision to make. Her clock was ticking, as they say. Carla had dated in college and afterward but had not found a suitable mate. She expected to marry but didn’t feel the urgency that some of her friends had shown. Perhaps, Carla thought in retrospect, she should have shown greater urgency. But Carla had decided that she would only marry a husband in whom she had great confidence. And that man hadn’t yet shown up, maybe until now. After a lull in her dating life that unfortunately stretched beyond months into a few years, Carla had recently met a man who, like Carla, had never married and who, like Carla, was clearly looking for a lifetime mate. The man didn’t bowl Carla over. She hadn’t fallen head-over-heels in love with him. But Carla hadn’t expected to find anyone who would make her feel that way, either. And she was beginning to think that this man just might be Mr. Right.
Heart
The quality of the marital relationship is at the heart of the family. When things are good between mom and dad, it’ll take a lot to throw a family off kilter. When things are not good between mom and dad, a family hardly stands a chance. The quality of the marital relationship only depends in part on how spouses find, choose, court, and marry one another. The marital relationship may depend just as much or more on how committed spouses are to one another and how quickly and much spouses grow together. Yet if you have your druthers, you’d choose a well-matched mate. As great as our capacity may be to adjust, grow, and adapt, compatibility may be a real thing. Marry an incompatible spouse, and your family may have a hard row to hoe ahead of it. Marry a highly compatible spouse, and wedded bliss may be right around the corner. So, choosing the right spouse, or letting the right one choose you, can make a good start to a sound family life.
Regrets
If you’re already married, consider giving this chapter a quick skim anyway. You may learn something about how you went about deciding that your spouse was the right one for you. It’s not that you’re going to do it over again. Married is married, usually best with a commitment for life. And it’s not that you should be carrying regrets. Regret is the poisonous seed of dissension. We are generally far better to count our lucky stars that we have a spouse than to regret the one whom we married. Yet any insight into the mystery of your marriage may help. Marriage is indeed a mystery, which is another way of saying that the variables to a good marriage or even to a good choice of a spouse are too many and too difficult to evaluate to treat the question by formula. Formulas don’t make good marriages. If God calls you to marry or not, then listen. But if you’re not hearing him clearly, then marriage indicators like the following may help.
Interest
To find your marriage partner, through dating or introductions and then through courtship, you must generally know of your interest in doing so. Indeed, others likely need to know of your interest, too. Dating signals availability but not necessarily marital interest. Lots of folks date with no intention of marrying. That fact complicates dating for those who date only to find a marriage partner. Fortunately, you don’t have to date in order to identify potential marriage partners. Dating can be physically, mentally, and emotionally hard to do. Depending on how you handle it, dating can be dangerous and corrupting, too. If you know you want to marry, try sharing your interest in marriage with friends and acquaintances who care about you. You may get more matchmaking than you wished. Friends who know your marital interest may, more often than you wish, introduce you to someone else interested in marrying whom they think might be for you. Matchmaking, though, can be a safer and clearer way to go about meeting marriage candidates. The friend who introduces you to a candidate has already checked out that candidate. You need only to determine which candidate is right for you.
Commitment
Commitment is a prime indicator for a sound spouse. If you’re fully committed to one another, all in on the marriage and with gratitude for it, then that devotion will help both of you make the necessary adjustments. Spouses can take years to understand and adjust to one another. As close as you may have been before marriage, you can still feel like nearly total strangers that first morning you wake up together as a newly married couple. Of course, that’s the excitement of marriage. But the different habits, preferences, and disciplines or indisciplines of a new spouse still take some getting used to. And that’s where commitment does its hard job. Don’t talk someone into marrying you. Your reasoning might be correct and convincing, but marriage is still not something to force. Sooner or later, you’ll need to rely on mutual commitment. Look for someone who wants to marry you at least as much as you want to marry them. Strong mutual commitment makes a good start.
Character
A good, marriageable character is usually one of the first things people mention when considering marriage candidates. Basic decency is a good start, including good hygiene and manners, and a consistent willingness to listen to others, recognize their interests, and respect those interests, too. Marriage can be heaven when you know that your spouse is listening, discerning, and respecting. Marriage can be hard when your spouse is doing none of those things or, indeed, failing to do all three of them. Are there any nonnegotiables? It can be hard to tell. You hear of marriages that start off on the wrong foot, one spouse or both having some marital deterrent, demerit, deficit, or disability, say, drinking, drugs, divorce, or debt, and that’s keeping things nice. But merits can make up for demerits. We’ve all erred, and none of us are perfect. The bigger question may be a spouse’s desire to do better along with the capacity and character to follow through. Marrying someone who wants to grow, mature, and improve, and can actually do so, may soon correct many newlywed ills.
Deception
Trust, though, is definitely a big nonnegotiable. If marriage candidates should have one nonnegotiable, trust should be it. Deception is often what gets a good spouse into a bad marriage. The faults that the deceiver covers up to induce the marriage aren’t necessarily the worst thing. The deception is instead what ruins the marriage. Commitment induced by deception is not truly consensual. Lies have instead coerced it. Truth should be the expectation as to everything, especially as to anything potentially material to the mutual, open, informed, and completely voluntary decision to marry. The materiality of the disclosure is up to the two candidates to judge. Material considerations may or may not include the number and nature of prior intimate relationships, whether those relationships have ended and if so on what terms and how long ago, and what children, diseases, or abuse those relationships produced. Material considerations may or may not include education, licensure, jobs, careers, income, assets, and debt, or addictions, convictions, institutionalizations, or diagnoses. But if one candidate considers the circumstance material, then the other must respect it and make a full and honest disclosure. You cannot build a marriage on lies.
Affinities
Commitment and trust are a good marriage’s bedrock. Affinities are, to once again mix metaphors, the icing on the cake. If you and your spouse share interests, activities, experiences, and preferences, and are at least close in age, education, ability, and family backgrounds, then the two of you have less to naturally divide you and more to naturally attract. You don’t have to like the same flavor of ice cream. But if you both like to bike, hike, and run, and have roughly equal capacity to do so, then you have at least a few things in common to enjoy. If you both like to read, swim, travel, and go to the opera, you’ll have even more in common to enjoy. One another, your new home together, and any children who may soon join you may be enough in common without having other affinities. You can make your own new affinities together. But activities and interests in common can pave the way to an enjoyable and thus more-committed relationship.
Faith
Religious faith can be one of those helpful, important, or critical affinities, depending on your view. We vary in our views of whether one should or must marry within the faith, or marry one without a traditional faith expression. Those views can also change over time and, frankly, across candidates. A person of faith might, for instance, consider as an acceptable candidate an agnostic with a soft heart who has never had exposure to a gracious and caring community of faith. A person of faith might likewise reject as a candidate another person of the same faith who has a hard heart toward others. Formal faith expression, in other words, may be less significant than the capacity to develop and mature in faith, especially among younger adults who have not yet had significant exposure to faith. Scripture states or implies not to marry an unbeliever while also assuring that the faith of a believing spouse sanctifies the unbeliever. With a good capacity for spiritual growth, reflected by an open mind and soft heart, individuals with different forms or degrees of faith may well adjust to one another, particularly if commitment and character are good, and other strong affinities exist.
Choosing
The above discussion presumes that you have more than one potential marriage candidate, perhaps a full field of candidates. The world holds a lot of unmarried individuals, many of whom are interested in and eligible for marriage. Yet for one reason or another, you may not have much or any choice. Some don’t have the luxury or character to get around, look around, and shop around for marriage candidates. Yet you may not even want to approach marrying as a market exploration. Marrying doesn’t have to be transactional, like picking out a new car. Transactional marriages may introduce their own weakness into their architecture. If the qualities of the spouse change over time, as they inevitably do, then the transaction can take on a different cast and character, to the marriage’s detriment. So don’t necessarily treat the choice of a spouse as, well, a choice. Good marriages seem to have destiny to them more so than a transactional nature. Pray for destiny. Unarticulated intuition can be a powerful guide. Don’t always weigh, measure, and analyze. The heart can know more than the mind.
Process
Your marriage process, then, may be more important than your marital choice. If commitment, character, truthtelling, and destiny are key ingredients to bringing about a fruitful marriage, then you need to follow a process that reveals those ingredients. We traditionally call that process courtship. Dating doesn’t really lead to marriage. Dating leads to more dating. Courtship leads to a mutual decision about marriage, one way or the other. Parties don’t court to date. Parties court to decide whether and when to marry. Courtship differs from dating in that it isn’t simply to get to know one another or to have a good time. Courtship is instead a series of choreographed steps that help the parties confirm their decision to marry or not marry, one way or the other. In courtship, parties confirm a decision more than make a decision. When courtship begins, right around the time the parties first broach the subject of marriage, the parties have likely already intuited the answer that they expect courtship to confirm.
Courtship
So, court. First, speak gently, even indirectly, about the subject of marriage in general. Then begin to treat one another with the formality and kindness, and treat the relationship between you, with the sensitivity and gravitas that engagement and marriage warrant. Gradually, speak more directly and openly about the prospect of marriage. Even surmise what your plans together might be if you were to marry, such as what education to complete, where to live, how to live, and whether and when to have how many children. Learn how each you envision marriage in your own dreams and when dreaming together. Watch how your families, friends, and communities respond to your courting. Courting is intentionally a public and social phenomenon, both preparing the community to support the couple and giving the couple community feedback on their prospects. Sometimes, we don’t see so well for ourselves, when others can see better for us. Through courtship you may sense God’s desire.
Reflection
If you are already married and have a family, does the quality of your marriage reflect the quality of your family life? If you strengthened your marriage, would your family life improve? If you are not yet married, do you know if you wish to marry? If you do wish to marry, do your friends and acquaintances know, too, so that they can help you connect with suitable candidates? With which friends could you fruitfully share your interest, trusting them to handle your interest with appropriate sensitivity? How committed do you believe you can be to marriage? How will you recognize commitment in the one whom you decide might be a serious candidate? What character should your spouse have? Are you ready to share the truth about your own background, habits, circumstances, and condition, if your marriage candidate wants to know? What are matters about which you would not want your candidate to deceive you? Are you prepared to ask your candidate about those matters, while clearly expressing that truth is essential to your informed commitment? What common interests or affinities would you like to see in a marriage candidate? Do you have nonnegotiables? How comfortable can you be with a courtship process that gives the two of you time to work your way through the sensitivity and weight of a potential engagement and marriage?
Key Points
A good marriage is at the heart of a good family life.
Don’t live married life with regrets but with gratitude.
To find a spouse, it helps to let others know of your marital interest.
Commitment is the root of a healthy and growing marriage.
Marriageable character makes a good start for choosing a mate.
Deception in dating deprives a marriage of essential informed consent.
Common interests and affinities can make a marriage more enjoyable.
Open minds and soft hearts may recalibrate faith differences.
Marrying may not mean choosing among candidates but discerning.
Follow a sound process so that you are able to discern whom to marry.
Courtship is the traditional and sound process for deciding to marry.