Saving your Marriage by Demanding Discomfort

The greater the gift, the greater the demands.

I'm not sure if anyone has quoted that before, but I think it stems from Luke 12:48, which says, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." It hit me recently how much this relates to marriage, but how we only associate it with gifts other than marriage.

Think about it: if work requires our time or dedication, we'll oblige. If getting a degree or title takes great effort or even demands a chunk of our life, we'll willingly offer it up so long as we can earn the reward. We will dedicate enormous amounts of time and money to gain our dream home, or secure a future for our kids.

But when it comes to our marriages, where is the acceptance of demands? If anything, the world tells us that we should never allow someone else to demand anything from us. There's a phrase in the pilates/yoga arena which echoes this notion: Let go of whatever is not serving you today. Do we let go of our marriages when they are not serving us?

For those in committed relationships: what if you could actually see the future, and you saw that by allowing your spouse's wants and needs to trump your own, you would actually gain a healthier, happier, and more holistic marriage and even a better life. Would you give up your whole life as you know it in order to not just save your marriage, but to reap a reward for the rest of your life?

Now at first it feels easy to insert exceptions, interjections and excuses against such a challenge. Why let someone walk all over you? What if their demands go against your morality? What if your marriage has already failed so there are a plethora of difficult dynamics to navigate? What if your spouse won't give up anything, but you're willing to give up everything?

Let's for now just set these excuses to the side and focus on marriage as a whole. When I think about how many marriages are struggling right now, too often what's required is a release and replacement. Release the world's demands and replace them with simple truth.

For example, when I was first pregnant, I bought into the pressure of registering for all the things that my first baby would "need." My best friend was living abroad and already had two kids and a third on the way, so I asked her advice on the "must haves." She didn't give me the list I was expecting. She said, "Remember all that baby needs is you and a drawer." Huh? What about the Nose Frida or the Bob stroller? Nope. "You for food. The drawer to sleep in." She kept it very simple so that the world couldn't crowd her with other demands.

Couples tend to press deeper and deeper into demands complicating and even separating them from one another. Work, community, schedules, kids, exercise, etc. But in order to adjust their trajectory, one or both of them would need to fully alter their life. Releasing a routine that's taken years to create and replacing it with simplicity together may appear to be utterly ridiculous or even impossible.

The idea of leaving everyone and everything I knew: our house, hospitals for my medically fragile son, friends we'd known most of our lives, and financial security in order to go and live in a small trailer, with four boys, and without a plan all bordered on insanity. I would not have described this plan as a place where I'd thrive.

But I didn't learn to live a mobile lifestyle overnight. God always provides training wheels. I practiced, and I prayed. A lot. A lot more than I ever had before because I actually had time to pray. By taking steps outside my comfort zone my marriage began to thrive. I saw my husband's joy in the adventure and our family's growth through the hardest parts. Even in the most difficult and loneliest moments, I saw the blessing this reset was for our marriage. We had released the world's pattern and replaced it with God's.

It usually takes a dramatic diagnosis or downfall in our culture for something like this to happen, but I'm grateful it didn't in our case. I saw how my own external discomfort led to significant internal peace within my family and especially my marriage.

While my husband never demanded anything from me, he did encourage me to trust the process of faith, and to never say never. I wonder now what God will ask of us because we have so many incredible gifts from Him. Thankfully the opposite is also true--the greater the demands, the greater the gifts.

~Carefully & Carelessly Releasing and Replacing