Training for an Excellent Marriage
Many of us invest significant time and money in preparing for our career. Do we give the same priority to preparing for an excellent marriage? Today, R.C. Sproul exhorts us to consider how we may become more intentional as spouses.
One of the things that a professional football player has to be: He doesn't have to be an intellectual, but he better understand football. If you're going to be a top accountant, you better understand the principles of accounting. And you do know that intuitively. People prepare for their careers in this country by going to college, investing thousands and thousands of dollars to attend courses to equip them for their vocation. They stay at that preparation for years, make an enormous financial commitment, and acquire as much skill and knowledge as they possibly can in order that they might be successful, in order that they may excel.
Now, I want to ask you people: How many of you have read 50 books about marriage? How many of you have spent $10,000.00 studying, learning, about marriage? How many of you have read 50 books in preparation for your vocation? How many have you spent $10,000.00 in preparation for your vocation? If you lose your job, for which you've trained and prepared and been educated, that will be a trauma for you, a serious trauma for your life. But it will not affect you as adversely as a divorce, or the total loss, in terms of alienation, of one of your children.
There is a very real sense in which our families mean more to us than our jobs. What man wouldn't quit his job if it meant it would save the life of his wife and family? And yet, in our country, we're all conditioned and taught to study hard, work, prepare, prepare, prepare, train, train, train for vocation. But marriage? You fall in love, you get the license. If you're one of those unusual people, you may get pre-marital counseling for one or two or three sessions. And if you're really admirable, maybe you even take a course in college on marriage and family planning. That's about it. Then we embark on what of the most high-risk enterprises that any human being can ever become involved in.
What I want to get at here is that if you want to have an excellent marriage, the first thing you have to be prepared to do is to work, and to work hard. Because excellent marriages in this day and age, when almost 50% of marriages in this country dissolve in divorce and a whole lot more are extremely unhappy and provide a miserable atmosphere for the home in general, if you want to transcend the normal in this country, you're going to have to be prepared to work at it, because it doesn't come naturally.
And that means studying. Not necessarily studying marriage from an intellectually psychological perspective, or anthropological perspective, or sociological perspective. But what it means primarily is a disciplined study of the people that are involved in your family: your wife, your husband, your children, your in-laws. Because the strength and the intensity of the family unit is inseparably related to the intimacy that that family enjoys; and intimacy, my friends, is built upon knowledge of each other. If you want an excellent marriage, you have to have knowledge of people. And if you want knowledge of people, you've got to have a disciplined study, not just an intuitive grasp or just gaining that knowledge by osmosis. You have to work at it.
What's going on inside your wife's head? What's really on her mind? What is really important to her at this stage of her life? What are her dreams and aspirations? What are her frustrations? What are her worries and anxieties? What kind of clothes does she like to wear? Where would she like to visit? If she had a chance to go somewhere with you, where would it be? Do you know the answers to those questions?
