Creating an intimate marriage

My remarks here are for ordinary, good people who know they could find more sweetness in their marriage. And for those who are not yet in a position to create a sweet marriage, if faithful, their time will come. In the meantime, there are refinements to make.

The holy theme of marriage laces itself throughout the scriptures as we read of wedding suppers, wedding guests, bride and bridegroom – each of these carrying a hidden vision of eternity: “I will even betroth thee unto me . . . and thou shalt know the Lord” (Hosea 2:20); this is marriage language, revealing the proximity, intimacy, and identity the Lord envisions for us and with us in our marriage.

However, our reality is that many of us were raised in families who lived with conflict. Conflict in relationships is what most of us know, such that when we marry, we necessarily bring unrecognized distortions into marriage; and then, as time goes on, these issues begin to surface, causing confusion and distress, and the result is many non-intimate marriages. Milton describes that “drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption.”(1)

In these circumstances, it is easy to feel despair about creating an emotionally and spiritually intimate marriage. But Spencer Kimball wrote:

While marriage is difficult, and discordant and frustrated marriages are common, yet real, lasting happiness is possible, and marriage can be more an exultant ecstasy than the human mind can conceive. This is within the reach of every couple, every person.(2)

In fact, according to the Lord’s plan, our marriage can become a springboard to greater spiritual development, higher consciousness, and enhanced creative expression.(3) We can learn, with a deeper penetration into the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to live together in a state of continuous love and positive energy that exceeds our expectations.

Sometimes it helps to get a broader perspective of the nature of marriage. Prophets and Seers have attempted to express their visions of eternal marriage, but it seems to exceed their ability to describe. Brigham Young, for instance, said:

The whole subject of the marriage relation is not in my reach, nor in any other man’s reach on this earth. It is without beginning of days or end of years; it is a hard matter to reach. We can tell some things with regard to it; it lays the foundation for worlds, for angels, and for the Gods; for intelligent beings to be crowned with glory, immortality, and eternal lives. In fact, it is the thread which runs from the beginning to the end of the holy Gospel of salvation – of the Gospel of the Son of God; it is from eternity to eternity. When the vision of the mind is opened, you can see a great portion of it, but you see it comparatively. . . . So it is with the visions of eternity; we can see and understand, but it is difficult to tell.(4)

Though male and female are separate in their characteristics and function, it is together, between them, that the powers of godliness are generated. Thus, God could never be defined as male alone or female alone; they are interdependent. An early Jewish text teaches that when a man and a woman marry, “their personal union draws its power from the cosmic marriage that underlies all existence”(5) – that is, there is a power in the Divine Marriage that upholds all creation while it empowers our marriage.

Obviously, then, oneness and resonance are the way of life in Heaven. The image of this at-one-ment dominates the Heavens as all the hosts of the highest Heaven are, each one, lined up in this spiritual oneness, in this channel of revelation. The Savior frequently alludes to that relationship; e.g., “I am in the Father, and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one – [I am] the Father because he gave me of his fullness” (D&C 93:3). They are so close that they seem almost to share identity; perhaps this description helps us understand celestial marriage also. And praying for us, the Savior pleads: “Father, I pray . . . for those whom thou hast given me out of the world. . . that I may be in them as thou, Father, art in me, that we may be one. (3 Nephi 19:29).

We tend to resist this principle, thinking maybe that we’d have to give up too much of our being – but that is not the case, when rightly understood. And we may think it is difficult to practice, but here is the great divine mystery: it is this very oneness with each other and with other Divine Beings that not only gives us access to the Heavens, but also produces that fullness of joy inherent in eternal life.

What a paradox, that beneath the shells and masks and separateness we create to protect ourselves from the world, the thing our eternal spirit wants most is perfect closeness – that’s what we came from before this life, and that’s the principle we are to take back with us. It is in these spiritual/emotional unions, these at-one-ments entered into on earth, that the Lord’s work is perfected.

Obviously, in order to live in the Heavens with these unified beings, we need to study oneness in this life. One place to start is to examine our way of being with each other. We tend to encounter and engage each other in one of two ways of being: resistant or responsive.(6) Briefly, the resistant way is either overtly or subtly adversarial and does not recognize the value or needs of the other person. But the other way of being, the responsive way, does value the other as a person and responds with understanding and love.

We may not be conscious of which way of being we employ in our marriage; probably most of us vacillate between responsive and resistant. Perfecting our love has to do, first, with becoming conscious of our way of being — and what it is doing to our loved one. A useful question that expands our consciousness is: What would my spouse say my way of being is – resistant or responsive?

That leads us to the realization that many things can get in the way of at-one-ment in marriage. We each bring our own childhood baggage and our old, painful, unenlightened, often unconscious programming to a marriage, and then unwittingly we practice forms of abuse that we ourselves do not recognize as such, but that hurt our spouse and our relationship.

If you suspect in yourself or in your relationship some abusive elements, you’ll find the book noted below helpful.(7) The author defines abuse this way: “If the words or attitude disempower, disrespect, or devalue the other, then they are abusive.”(8) She finds that people seem to come from one of two realities that have to do with how we use power. “There are two kinds of power. One kills the spirit. The other nourishes the spirit.” She says that the kind that kills the spirit could be called “Power Over.” Power Over shows up as control and dominance. The other kind, the kind that nourishes the spirit, she calls “Personal Power,” which shows up as mutuality and co-creation. “Mutuality is a way of being with another person which promotes the growth and well-being of one’s self and the other person by means of clear communication and empathetic understanding.”(9)

Empowering each other in each other’s growth allows both partners to mature and become independent in their own spheres, true to their own being. This fuller development and independence allow them then to enter into a mature relationship of interdependence for accomplishing shared goals. People in this kind of marriage “can acknowledge their mistakes and resolve their upsets in a mutually supportive way.”(10) This can take practice. She says, “As we grow in this reality, we come to the realization that we can neither accept nor tolerate the devaluation of another person.”(11)

She uses the word “empathetic” above. The heart of empathy is a setting aside of all judgment of another in order to understand deeply another’s world, thoughts, and emotions as if they were our own. This kind of empathy is a spiritual quality and forms the basis of a resonant relationship.

It is sweet to look deeply into our loved one with compassion and understanding. Instead of picking at each other, rolling our eyes, thinking how incompetent the other is, wishing we could trade him or her for another, calling each other various names under our breath – instead of these resistant and evil behaviors, we can decide who we’re really going to be and what it is we really want to create. We can envision a new way of being that has power to transform both of us. Instead of devaluing our precious companion, we can sensitively discern how to help things go right, at the same time forsaking all blame and accusation as intolerable. Thus the Holy Spirit of Promise may begin to take us seriously.

When we change our way of being with another, when we give that person a different person to respond to, things have to change.

We learn finally that it is resistance to love that we’ve been practicing.

We’re mostly children when we marry, so undeveloped, so unfinished. What did we know about holy love when we married? As I look back over the forty-some years of my marriage, I see what a spiritually refining tutorial it has been. We started out in heady, romantic love — each with different expectations. Through the years the barometer went up and down, as we each dealt with immaturities and confusions, trying to get our bearings. But as the years and children have come and gone, we now find ourselves intertwined in each other’s soul. What a precious thing marriage can be in the bonds of trust.

I’ve learned that we have a choice as to how we work things out together – we can do it with pain or we can have fun. We can take a stand for joy and make a commitment to have a good time in our marriage. Obviously neither our self, nor our spouse, nor our circumstances have to be ideal for there to be abundant happiness and satisfaction, in our covenant of transcendent love.

So, instead of waiting for our spouse to become an ideal, let us realize how much power each of us has to bring Heaven on earth.

Notes

1 John Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Preface.

2 Marriage, 37-38

3 Paraphrased from Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, Conscious Loving, 3.

4 JD 2:90.

5 https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/477629/jewish/Kabbalah-of-Marriage.htm.

6 Terry Warner’s terms, as in Bonds that Make Us Free, or in materials available at Arbinger.com

7 Patricia Evans, The Verbally Abusive Relationship.

8 Ibid., 37.

9 Ibid., 29.

10 Ibid., 38.

11s Ibid., 36.