Dear Keith,

Many of my reservations in relationships come from what seems to me to be a lack of spiritual leadership. I'm not talking only about the kind of spiritual leadership that involves praying and reading scripture together. I'm talking about the kind of spiritual leadership that gives me assurance that he loves Jesus far more than he loves me.

Sometimes I feel like I expect too much spiritually and that maturity comes over time. Still, before I commit to someone, I want to be able to trust that they have a dynamic and committed spiritual life. As a woman, what kind of standards should I be setting for spiritual leadership in a future/potential spouse?                       
                                                        --Standard Bearer

Dear Standard Bearer,

Keep your standards high! If you value faith as a deep, life-ordering priority, you want a partner who shares your values. Faith is profoundly intimate. To rob yourself and your spouse of the opportunity to merge and synergize faith means a disconnect in a central arena of life.  And if your faith is strong and integrated into your whole life, you’ll want a spouse who also integrates faith into decisions about family, vocation, finances and every other important aspect of time together.

Most of the deepest discord between spouses is born out of divergent core values. When deep values don’t line up, the house is built on a fault zone. The smallest decisions, which are always informed by deeper core values, can shake the house over and over again. How we invest time, money, energy and emotional interest is forever an outgrowth of deeply held views of relative worth. Find someone who orders relative worth in a way similar to yours.

That being said, there are some wonderful marriages in which this union around faith is missing. This is possible when a non-practicing partner offers purposeful, genuine and consistent support of the faith-life of his/her spouse. Yes, there’s lost intimacy around the lack of shared belief. Prayer together, for example, can be as intimate as sex, and often more! But authentic respect can bring a lot of healing to that divide. And some non-religious people (or people who practice other religions) are capable of offering that respect.

Going into marriage, I take seriously the biblical teaching not to be “unequally yoked.” (2 Corinthians 6:14) As with other scriptures that seem prohibitive, the underlying motivation is God’s love. God wants us to know that deeper intimacy and to share together, and then pass on, our Christian faith.

If you’re already married to someone who doesn’t share your faith values, then the best thing to pursue is an honestly respectful relationship. Even you’re spouse’s lack of faith can be treated with respect—for the individual nature of every spiritual journey.

Now, finally, please realize your future husband will practice his faith in a language so different than yours. As in male and female relationships, men and women interrelate with God in different terms and styles. My wife and I rarely read the same books. She’s inspired by things that don’t always move me, and vice versa. Maintaining a family devotion time is a rare reality, even for ardent believers, and I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for your husband to lead that charge. Find good ways to merge your faith interests, but don’t put your relationship to the foolish test of thinking that it should be a smooth and easy intercourse. Encourage each other, but don’t judge the other based on the personality of your own manner with God.

So keep the standard high, my friend. And remember that your husband will bring a much different, and hopefully complimentary, spiritual component into your life.

Dear Keith:

            What does it look like to follow and support my husband’s lead when I disagree? What about when I think I hear something different from the Lord? I want to trust that he’s making the right choice, but my heart isn’t there yet, and I’m not sure how to get there.

                                                                        Trying to Honor

Dear Trying,

First, let me applaud your instincts to honor and support your husband. His opinions matter and he needs to feel your respect. It’s good for him to be respected and it’s good for your own soul to respect him.

That being said, you also deserve honor, support and respect. Especially in marriages that do selective Bible reading, people live with the impression that only the wife is supposed to “submit to her husband.” The biblical model, laid out beautifully in Ephesians 5 and with even more poignancy in the teaching of Jesus, is mutual submission. Real leadership is servanthood, according to the one who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life….” Marriage works best when both partners are “laying down their lives” for one another. And yes, even their opinions.

So it’s critical for you to communicate your concerns and your opinions. Early in marriage, it’s typical to be threatened by disagreement. “What if our relationship falls apart?!” As marriage matures, we become aware that disagreement is not only survivable—it’s preferable. God created both of you with different ways of thinking and seeing things. When both of you are honest and forthcoming, your marriage is made stronger by the wealth of perspectives. While it’s tempting to make music that is melodic (everyone on the same note), relationship has more texture when it’s harmonious--different people play different notes until something really rich happens.

But doesn’t a decision still need to be made?

Yes. Sometimes, the decision gets made based on a healthy sense of give and take. Other times, compromise is the answer. Still other times, decisions are based on role distribution. For example, I’m likely to finally submit to my wife’s micro-finance decisions in our household, but she’s more likely to support my macro-finance decisions. She’s great at the micro game, and I’m gradually learning the macro.

But what about male headship?

The Bible teaches headship after the model of Jesus Christ, who “gave himself up” for his bride. Any man who practices male authority as a control strategy is behaving in ways that are profoundly anti-Jesus. Jesus simply never approves of power trips, and even wields his own universal authority with lightness and humility.

And when a woman submits to her husband from a position of weakness, rather than from the strength of faith-filled servanthood, she’s harming herself and the relationship.

So friend, find your voice. Tell the truth. Hold your opinion lightly and ask for a respectful hearing. Help your husband learn with you how to live in a spirit of mutual love, respect and submission.

Knowledge is no guarantee of bliss. Sometimes, we can see problems coming like a train in the night and they still land just as hard and pommel us as roundly as the unexpected calamity.

Other times, a bit of knowledge can make all the difference. It’s possible that I’m naïve—the early years would have been just as demanding with a bit of knowledge. But I don’t think so. When these truths finally took hold, marriage became so much more doable for my wife and me. More than a quarter-century into the game, I consider every informed year to have been a richer one.

1.     The thinking/feeling dilemma

A very quick personality test, like the Myers/Briggs, will reveal that some people trust their feelings more than their logical thinking, while others trump their feelings with logical thinking. It’s not that “thinkers” aren’t capable of feeling. And “feelers” can be extremely intelligent. But the question is: “Do my emotional instincts or my logical reasonings finally win the day?”

While some people and couples will dodge the stereotypes by landing in the minority camps, the typical marriage looks like this: wife is a “feeler” and husband is a “thinker.” Eighty percent of women score higher on their “feeling” quotient, while eighty percent of men register as “thinkers.” And, to make matters more challenging and humorous, we subconsciously select mates who compliment us, versus mates who align with us.

For me, my lack of knowledge meant long, painful, escalating conflicts fueled by my idiotic determination to “talk some sense” into my wife. She felt what she felt, and there wasn’t a logical argument in the book that would have dissuaded her from the strength of her emotion.

2.     The Power of Really Listening

Armed with new understanding about the force of my wife’s emotions, another reality reshaped our life together. Life smoothed out when I began to listen.

It took years to make this discovery, but somehow my logical brain arrived at this reality: my wife needs me to listen, empathize and do my best to understand the emotional impact of her experiences. She doesn’t need me to explain her feelings away. She doesn’t need me to argue the other side to grant perspective, as thinkers are prone to do. She definitely doesn’t need me to fix her! She needs a patient and interested listener while she weaves and winds her way to resolution.

The “feeler” has lessons to learn, as well. Mostly this: having a “thinker” around is a good thing for a host of critical moments that require emotional detachment. Yes, it can be frustrating to be married to someone who “just doesn’t understand me.” But the thinker is usually teachable and can learn how to “try really, really hard to understand,” which can be just as affirming as emotional synergy.

So the “thinker” needs to probe and listen, probe and listen. If it helps, restate and prove that you’re trying to grasp the intricacy of feeling. Don’t stop listening. Resolution isn’t the goal (which can drive a “thinker” crazy). Understanding is.

By the way, I have a vague recollection of the pastor trying to prepare me for this prior to marriage. It was a valiant effort, I’m sure. But I wasn’t ready to listen to him, either. Later, I learned by necessity.

3.     The Love Languages

I groan audibly whenever I reflect on the fifteen years of marriage prior to reading Dr. Gary Chapman’s book on love languages. Truthfully, I never even finished the book. Once I read the premise, the whole world turned right side up.

It’s not complicated. Chapman simply suggests that there are five primary ways in which we express our love:

            Acts of service

            Physical touch

            Gift-giving

            Words of affirmation

            Quality time

While all of us might use all five languages, each of us would prioritize them differently. More precisely, each of us likes to be loved in different ways. I might want words of affirmation and physical touch far more than the other three, while my wife favors acts of service, quality time and gift-giving.

All to say, there were years when I loved her a lot, but not well. Even though I was pouring on the love, I was pouring it on in my own languages. Once I learned to value her language, and to start practicing love accordingly, we made some new connections. And since she was learning the same lesson, I felt more loved by her.

It’s easy at this moment to cry out at God for making marriage a really tough jigsaw puzzle. Call it God’s sense of humor or God’s commitment to a steep curriculum, but learning how to fill in our deficits by becoming well-rounded lovers might be the most important occupation of a lifetime.

4.     The Force of Our Households of Origin

For twenty years, I watched my dad arrive home from work, sit down on the couch and read the newspaper. For better or worse, this was his ritual. He probably needed to unwind. Perhaps he watched his dad do the same. So for the first year of my marriage, I came home from work, plopped down on the couch and followed suit.

Eventually, my wife intervened. “It makes me feel dejected. You’ve been away from me all day and you’d rather see the newspaper than have a conversation?”

This was an easy fix. Right away I realized that I was simply play-acting—playing the grownup. Dad did it so I did it. It wasn’t logical or preferable. It was simply what I’d been shown. I changed my habits.

The years proved that the newspaper thing was only the tip of the relational iceberg. Resolving that one small issue equipped us to be more honest about numerous other fields in which both of us mimicked our parents, sometimes even when we were determined never, never, never to do it their way. That might have been the surprise—how sticky the habits and rituals of our households of origin can be. Now we’re eyes wide open. And, of course, we’re creating whole new weird rituals for our children!

5.     The Importance of Good Counselors

Going into marriage, I assumed that we would have a pretty seamless experience. After all, we loved each other so much!

The seams began to tear immediately. Sooner than I ever would have imagined, we needed a third party to help us negotiate our differences and gain insight into our pains and peculiarities.

Our first counseling experience was awful. After two appointments, my wife said, “She isn’t listening at all. I don’t think she’s heard a word I’ve said, and she refuses to listen to you. This woman is a man-hater. We need someone who can help us.”

Fortunately, we fell into excellent hands at the suggestion of a family member. Our next counselor listened, probed, sympathized, instructed and ultimately transformed our marriage.

There might have been a day when we were all to ashamed to admit that we need counseling. Hopefully, we’re over all of that. People need people. Even if your marriage is good, why not submit to a skilled helper who could bump your marriage into the great category?

Oh, there are so many more lessons we’ve learned. This one is worthy of note: keep learning. Go to school for life. Marriage never flourishes from inattention or a static approach.