AUDIO
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Phillip Jensen speaks on Anger as part of a series on emotions in the Christian life, delivered at the Australia Day Convention 2010
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Their workmates are cynical. Among their non-Christian friends it’s just not the normal thing to do. But Naomi and Frag Woodall say they’d do it all over again if they had the chance.
The Abbotsford couple attend an Anglican Church in the Inner West and celebrated their third wedding anniversary last month. They agree marriage is hard work, but say the joys outweigh the tough times.
“I didn’t go into marriage with a lot of expectation,” says Frag, 31, an industrial designer. “I think women go into it with childhood dreams. But marriage is so wonderful, it’s bizarre that people have such a negative view of it. It’s counter-cultural because it isn’t normal anymore.”
Naomi, 26, a teacher, says she had to give up some of her independence, but marriage has surpassed her expectations.
“I thought it would be harder,” Naomi admits. “I feel like there’s trouble waiting to happen!”
She says living together before they were married wasn’t an option. “People at work gasp when they hear I was married at 23. It’s commonplace to live with your partner these days, but I wanted to make a public commitment. Living together doesn’t have that same promise. We have this security and certainty that by the grace of God this person will stick it out.”
But peer pressure can take its toll. “At work some people are cynical and bitter about marriage. It’s hard to be positive about your spouse and be a Christian in that environment,” Naomi admits. “And Hollywood and the media don’t give us very helpful impressions of marriage.”
The couple received counselling before their wedding and believe forgiveness is crucial. And both are grateful to their church family for support. “At church you see good models of marriage and people obeying God’s word,” says Naomi. “It’s easy to put up the façade that everything is going well, but at the same time, we are fallible people.”
“We have to work at it daily,” Frag agrees. “When you make your vows, you have to live them out. It’s sin that wants to say ‘the grass is greener on the other side’. I think we’re really learning that.”
Madeleine Collins
Down the track
Ross and Rosemary Mitchell met at a Christian conference when Ross was 16 and Rosemary was 14. They were married five years later.
After 33 years of marriage, seven children aged 10 to 30 and two grandchildren (with two on the way), they appear to have a mixture of Christ-centredness and good humour in their marriage that has kept things as fresh as on the day of their wedding.
Ross, an engineer, recalls the pre-marriage seminar he and Rosemary, a teacher at Bankstown TAFE, attended in the weeks leading up to the wedding.
“The man leading said ‘I’ve been married for 25 years and it’s still as passionate as ever.’ I thought where is this going? He eventually got divorced.”
“It’s an adventure when you first get married. You’re living together and everything is your responsibility,” Rosemary says.
“Because we were so young the minister thought we were brother and sister, then he thought we just had the same surname. We said ‘No, we’re married!’”
However, the couple, who attend St John’s, Rockdale, says that experience has proven that it is possible to last the distance.
“Marriage gives you freedom,” Rosemary says. “Some people say it’s a shackle, but I think it’s freedom. You’ve made that commitment and you’re in the relationship. You can relax. It is much tenser in people’s lives when they’re single in some ways.”
Ross says keeping Christ at the centre is crucial. “You know your partner’s position on things. There is a sense of trust when difficult things happen with kids or if people get ill,” he says. “We’ve also been involved in very caring congregations that have accepted children into church.”
Rosemary agrees. “There is a much stronger sense of commitment when you have Jesus as an important strength you share automatically.”
But even after 30-odd years, balancing work, family and church is still a challenge.
“ I’ve had to rely on Rosemary a lot,” Ross says. “I used to be away for as often as three or four days a week, so Rosemary had to run the family at home.”
“Everyone talks about headship and wives obeying husbands but they forget the same passage requires the male to love his wife as Christ loved the church.”
Joseph Smith
Marriage has taken a beating over the last 30 years. Divorce, de-factos, more people marrying later or not at all. ANDREW CAMERON and TRACY GORDON argue for a return to relationships with God at the centre.
“Things become better when you expect the best instead of the worst.”
Norman Vincent Peale
This quotation appears at the start of a recent study of 82 newly married couples, who were interviewed over a four year period following their wedding. The study, which appeared in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, received much attention in the press.
The study found that couples might have good or poor relationship skills, and high or low expectations of marriage. Couples with high expectations, but low relationship skills, experienced steep declines in marital satisfaction. Couples with low expectations and low skills did not show the same declines. Couples with good relationship skills, and with high expectations, had higher marital satisfaction.
A fourth category, those with high skills but low expectations, were not addressed, but suggest such couples experience low satisfaction.
Researchers McNulty and Karney conclude “spouses who have the skills to attain positive outcomes benefit from positive expectations, but spouses who lack the skills to cultivate positive experiences may benefit from more moderate expectations.”
In another study into couples at the other end of marital life, Dr Robin Gutteridge, senior lecturer in health psychology at the University of Central England in Birmingham, conducted detailed interviews with 12 couples who had been together for an average of 44 years. She found that it is vital for couples to identify the small things that make a difference to their partner and to do this early in the relationship.
But marriage continues to be on the decline in Australia. Research released last month by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Diversity and Change in Australian Families, showed couples who live together before marriage are at greater risk of marriage breakdown.
The study concluded this is due partly to longer time in the relationship, but mostly due to characteristics of those who cohabit – they are more likely to have divorced parents, lower education, come from an English speaking background and are more likely to be less religious. About half break up within five years.
Almost three quarters (72 per cent) of all couples live together before they get married, compared to 16 per cent 30 years ago. A third of all marriages now consist of at least one person who has previously been married. Between 32 per cent and 46 per cent of marriages will end in divorce.
And for the first time, couples with children are no longer the norm, with only 47 per cent of families having children, compared with 60 per cent in 1976.
But people still have high hopes for marriage, just as Adam cried in exultation of his new wife, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!”
According to Bible scholar Walter Bruggeman, Adam’s exclamation is a kind of Hebrew code: here, at last, is someone who will be with him in his weakness and with him when he is strong and successful or as we say, ‘in sickness and in health’.
A relationship is affirmed which is unaffected by changing circumstances. It is a formula of constancy, or abiding loyalty, Mr Bruggeman says.
But for too many people marriage is exactly the opposite when it breeds miscommunication, resentment, monotony, boredom and hopelessness.
The Bible expects that marriage will have a dark side. The once-exultant Adam blames his wife for his own sin (Genesis 3:12); the four-generation saga of Genesis 12-50 is riddled with marital deception, intrigue, sexual impropriety, jealousy and greed; Job is pictured as having to endure an unsympathetic wife and the pain of a bad marriage is clear to the Proverbist. The New Testament recognises and assume the breakdown of marriage, when husbands are exhorted to love their wives, and wives to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22,25 and Colossians 3:18-19).
The asymmetry of the call upon men and women in a post-feminist world matches the contours of failure that the Old Testament expects to see in marriage: that women will desire to control and manipulate men, but men will reply simply by subjugating women by force.
The call to love is an obvious antidote for the male propensity to hit and act harshly. The Bible’s teaching on the call to submit, which includes a sense of cooperation, is an antidote for the female propensity to connive and control.
God has big dreams for marriage. Yet married couples pursue the dream in the wilderness as a pair of sinners picking their way through a broken world. In the language of the Bible, the negotiations of marriage are simply habits of repentance and forgiveness, spiced with an appreciation and insight into the the other person. Rather than being a system of mutual gain, where each waits for the their own need to be met, marriage becomes a system of mutual love, where each gives themselves for the good of the other, irrespective of the other’s performance.
Professor Tom Altobelli, of UWS, commented at a national marriage forum in Canberra earlier this year that unlike some other types of relationships, marriage is not an evolving institution: it remains substantially the same as humanity’s earliest records of it.
The Prime Minister John Howard is well known for his traditional views on the sanctity of wedlock: “I have often said that a stable, functioning, united home and marriage is not only the best emotional environment in which to raise children, but it is also the best and most efficient social welfare system that mankind has ever devised.”
Although the study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offered a nuanced view of marriage, media reaction missed these nuances and pounced on a common line: that people should simply lower their expectations of marriage. On this interpretation to aim too high causes us to miss out on what we want, and lowered expectations will avoid decline and divorce, and even keep the newlywed glow.
This view reflects a modern, secular view of marriage. US Christian academic Wendell Berry says “marriage, in its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate relationship involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a private political system in which rights and interests must be asserted and defended.”
He says marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their temporary association, the married couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. When marriage is simply a system where two individuals can gain more together than separately, it seems obvious that we get what we want when we seek it.
But this is sad reasoning. God dreams of more for our marriages, starting with deep repentance and forgiveness and moving forward into giving, kindness and love.
It is easy for Christians to forget the considerable relationship skills we learn just from our weekly exposure to the practises of God’s people. These practises, outlined in the Bible, are often lived out in imaginative ways within our church communities.
Many people don’t understand, for example, that a disillusionment phase is normal in the early years of a marriage. Christians are often taught to expect this. On the other hand, Christians might think that the practise of forgiveness is obvious, forgetting that this discovery would be a revolution for some beleaguered couples.
Followers of Jesus know marriage practises can be held out to a despairing world. Our churches can teach these practises and couples can live them. Such lives and teachings will always be a surprise, for they will show how to live the dream while having utterly realistic expectations. Someone who doesn’t yet believe in God might be intrigued by this hope.
With additional reporting by Madeleine Collins.
Dr Andrew Cameron and Tracy Gordon publish weekly briefings from the Social Issues Executive, available on http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/socialissues or via email from .