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Question
My husband and I have been married for more than thirty years and have raised a family. He was a convert and had reactivated to the Church at the time when we met. He pressured me until we were sexually intimate before marriage. We worked through the repentance process with our bishop, were married civilly, and a year later were sealed in the temple. However, at the time, I felt marriage was the right thing to do because I told myself I must love him or I wouldn’t have let that happen. But even now, sometimes I let depression seep in and I feel that I said “yes” to marriage mostly because of the pre-marital sexual intimacy.
He is a good man, but I tend to see serious faults and weaknesses. I think that my behavior has lessened his love for me although he never says that. Part of the ongoing problem is that we only have ever communicated on a surface level. He doesn’t share thoughts or feelings and doesn’t know how to respond when I have let the emotional floodgates open. I know that I do love him in some ways, but never have really been “in love” with him. How can I let go of doubts and truly love him as he is? I have read, pondered, cried, and prayed but still those feelings return at times. Can you give any advice?
Answer
What you are experiencing is not only common, but also the primary test of marriage, especially a celestial marriage that is designed to make us more like our Heavenly Parents. Brother Scott Gardner, a professor at BYU-Idaho, recently reminded us that marriage is central to Godâs plan to help us inherit everything our heavenly parents have and are. He says:
âMy friends, marriage is essential to God’s eternal plan. Before we came to earth, I can imagine us looking at our heavenly parents in awe and longing to have everything they had: a physical body (how amazing was that!); an eternal marriage with love and unity beyond compare. They were glorious to behold! They were exalted! How eager we must have been for the day that we could be married like them. We now have that precious opportunity right here in our mortal life: to learn to be like them. This is what we are shooting for. We are preparing to receive all that our heavenly parents have. This is precisely God’s whole work, His whole joy and passion. Indeed, it is His work and glory to help us to have that kind of marriage.â[i]
I realize you feel like your marriage is nowhere close to celestial expectations, but, like our own individual eternal progress, itâs important to recognize that our marriages deserve the same patience and long-suffering we hope to have for ourselves as we grow and develop Christ-like attributes.
I can see that youâre well acquainted with your husbandâs faults and weakness after 30 years of marriage and family life. Itâs true that just about everyone who has been married even 30 days begins to confront the honest reality of their partnerâs fallenness. I donât wonder why Lola Walterâs short, but powerful, story in the 1993 Ensign article, âThe Grapefruit Syndromeâ, is one of the most popular marriage articles ever submitted to the magazine. In it, she shares her ill-advised attempt to strengthen their marriage by pointing out her husbandâs faults, one of which was his method for eating a grapefruit. The offense? He peeled it like an orange instead of eating it with a spoon! When he didnât have any complaints about her, she immediately recognized how selfish and shallow her complaint was and that this wasnât the sum total of her husbandâs character.[ii]
Though a simple example, her conclusion is worth considering. We all marry someone who is going to do things that feel intolerable at times. And, itâs precisely this reality that provides the conditions that propel us toward growth and godhood. Meridian Magazineâs own Wally Goddard put it this way:
God did not design marriage to perfectly fulfill all of our self-centered desires. He had loftier and more demanding purposes in mind. Marriage is ordained of God as a training ground for developing Christ-like character. While marriage offers us deep love and an eternal bond with our spouse, that same relationship is likely to challenge us to develop greater compassion, forgiveness, sacrifice, and charity through the struggles we experience. As we honor our marital covenantâeven, or especially, during times when our marriage doesnât match our dreamsâwe become the people and partners God invites us to be.[iii]
These moments of marital distress can signal a false alarm that tells us to exit the marriage. However, this distress needs to be viewed with a bigger vision of why weâre here on earth and Godâs true purpose for marriage.
Now, please keep in mind that Iâm not talking about certain behaviors that should never be tolerated, which include abuse, addictions, and affairs. Any trace of these in a marriage requires the injured spouse to enact strict boundaries and call in support to create physical and emotional safety. These types of patterns are not to be endured, but instead, as Elder James E. Faust once described, need to be confronted as ârelationship[s] which [are] destructive of a personâs dignity as a human being.â[iv]
The challenge in todayâs self-obsessed culture is to sort through the harmful messages that tell us we should not tolerate anything that doesnât make us happy. Itâs a consumer mindset that makes marriage the product that can be returned with a full refund if it doesnât meet our needs. Dr. Bill Doherty has written extensively on this mindset and I recommend you read his article on consumer marriage versus modern-covenant marriage. He reminds us that a consumer mindset is a âfragile basis for a life-long commitment.â [v] He also acknowledges that people who feel they arenât getting what they need in marriage are in great pain and need to know that their needs matter. I agree with him that we shouldnât settle for unhealthy patterns, even if theyâre not at the toxic levels that require more drastic action. Doherty emphasizes that our commitment to the marriage is also balanced equally with our individual needs. He says:
âModern Covenant Marriage requires the habits of the heart and mind to cultivate a lifelong relationship that is loving and fair to both partners, where the well-being of your spouse and your marriage is as important as your own well-being, where the soft reasons for divorce are off the table, and where efforts for continued improvement of the marriage are tempered with acceptance of human limitations.â[vi]
When we donât give long-term commitment the same emphasis as individual needs and preferences, we are vulnerable to the lie that anything that causes us pain or suffering needs to be discarded. Yes, marriage is painful, even agonizing, at times. We canât treat the normal growing pains of marriage as something that only happens in bad marriages. We also canât believe that if we had made the right selection of a marriage partner, we would have been spared from suffering.
Dr. Scott Gardner put it this way:
Satan tries to make us think that hard times in marriage mean something dreadful–that our marriage is fatally flawed or needs to be ended. In reality, hard times in marriage are part of the Lord’s design to help each of us work to change and improve ourselves in ways that will bless us eternally. Marriage is a faith-based work. During hard times, we must have faith, we must work, and we must trust that this is something with which the Lord will help us.[vii]
When we buy into this line of thinking, I believe that our attention is misdirected to the less important choice. Once weâre married, we canât keep focusing on the choice of who we married. Instead, itâs about the choice of how weâll respond to this person in front of us. We have lots of choices to make. We need to choose how weâll view their own fallenness alongside our own fallenness. We can choose to turn toward them or turn away. We can choose to see God as the Grand Architect of marriage as the way to bring us closer to Him. We will wear ourselves out obsessing about the one fateful choice made years ago instead of choices we can do something about today.
Seth Adam Smith wrote a viral blog post about his realization 18 months into marriage that his marriage wasnât about him. He remembered this advice his father gave him before marriage:
[He said], marriage isnât for you. You donât marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isnât for yourself, youâre marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isnât for you. Itâs not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.â[viii]
If you want to see how unpopular this counsel is, just do a quick Google search for this blog post and youâll see pages of criticism stating that marriage should only be about our own happiness. We know that God had a different purpose in mind when he designed marriage. President Gordon B. Hinckley explained:
âI am satisfied that happiness in marriage is not so much a matter of romance as it is an anxious concern for the comfort and well-being of oneâs companion.â[ix]
This only works when both people have the anxious concern for one anotherâs comfort, so make sure you are doing your part and asking him to do his part. It wonât lead to marital happiness if one person is organizing around the otherâs comfort while ignoring his or her own needs and desires. You have serious concerns about both of your contributions to the marital struggles, so this is a great opportunity to commit to each other that youâll make the otherâs comfort your priority.
Alain de Botton wrote in the New York Times that we shouldnât abandon our imperfect partners, but instead abandon âthe founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.â[x] He continues:
âWe need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us â and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesnât exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently â the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ânot overly wrongâ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.â[xi]
So, whatâs the solution? As you can see, Iâve spent much of this response helping to reframe the problem. The kind of marriage problem youâre asking about requires repentance.[xii] And, as the Bible Dictionary defines it, repentance is simply âa change of mind, a fresh view about God, about oneself, and about the world.â[xiii] The change of mind happens as you see yourself, as King Benjamin put it, a beggar who depends on the same grace and mercy that is so difficult to give to our imperfect partners. He invites us to âimpart of your substance to the poor, every man according to that which he hath, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and administering to their relief, both spiritually and temporally, according to their wants.â[xiv] We often think of his counsel as it relates to strangers who ask us to help them get relief. However, these verses are an invitation for us to see our spouses and ourselves as beggars who all need relief.
Please donât buy into the belief that marriage is an institution that prevents us from growing, but instead, as the divinely designed environment where we have ongoing experiences for growth. A pair of BYU family scholars reviewed years of marriage and divorce research and found that most marriages can be saved and that itâs worth it to keep working.[xv] The consequences of divorce last for generations and if both partners are willing to work on rebuilding the marriage, it not only can be saved, but actually thrive.
This doesnât mean that you just put your head down and plow forward in duty and obedience. It means that you use the commitment to marriage as the reason to use your voice and ask for what you need. Speak up clearly and often. Let your husband know you want more connection and more affection in your marriage. Tell him that the patterns of interacting arenât working to create a close marriage. The marriage is what keeps us together so we can do the ongoing work of refining and growing. Without it, we would eject out at the first sign of struggle, heading down a different road for something less difficult.
Iâll end with Dr. Bill Dohertyâs encouraging words for anyone who has sought help for problems in their long-term marriage. While heâs speaking to therapists, itâs just as applicable to substitute âtherapistâ for yourself or anyone else who is trying to help you in your marriage. He says:
âI think of long-term marriage like I think about living in Minnesota. You move into marriage in the springtime of hope, but eventually arrive at the Minnesota winter with its cold and darkness. Many of us are tempted to give up and move south at this point. We go to a therapist for help. Some therapists donât know how to help us cope with winter, and we get frostbite in their care. Other therapists tell us that we are being personally victimized by winter, that we deserve better, that winter will never end, and that if we are true to ourselves we will leave our marriage and head south. The problem of course is that our next marriage will enter its own winter at some point. Do we just keep moving on, or do we make our stand now–with this person, in this season? Thatâs the moral, existential question. A good therapist, a brave therapist, will help us to cling together as a couple, warming each other against the cold of winter, and to seek out whatever sunlight is still available while we wrestle with our pain and disillusionment. A good therapist, a brave therapist will be the last one in the room to give up on our marriage, not the first one, knowing that the next springtime in Minnesota is all the more glorious for the winter that we endured together.â[xvi]
Geoff will answer a new family and relationship question every Friday. You can email your question to him at [email protected]
About the Author
Geoff Steurer is a licensed marriage and family therapist in St. George, UT. He is the owner of Alliant Counseling and Education (www.alliantcounseling.com) and the founding director of LifeStar of St. George, an outpatient treatment program for couples and individuals impacted by pornography and sexual addiction (www.lifestarstgeorge.com). He is the co-author of âLove You, Hate the Porn: Healing a Relationship Damaged by Virtual Infidelityâ, available at Deseret Book, and the audio series âStrengthening Recovery Through Strengthening Marriageâ, available at www.geoffsteurer.com. He also writes a weekly relationship column for the St. George News (www.stgnews.com). He holds a bachelors degree from BYU in communications studies and a masterâs degree in marriage and family therapy from Auburn University. He served a full-time mission to the Dominican Republic. He is married to Jody Young Steurer and they are the parents of four children.
You can connect with him at:
Website: www.lovingmarriage.com
Twitter: @geoffsteurer
Facebook: www.facebook.com/GeoffSteurerMFT
[i] https://www.byui.edu/devotionals/scott-gardner
[ii] https://www.lds.org/ensign/1993/04/the-grapefruit-syndrome?lang=eng
[iii] https://meridianmag.wpengine.com/what-to-do-when-marriage-doesnt-fit-the-dream/
[iv] https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1993/04/father-come-home?lang=eng
[v] https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=marriageandfamilies
[vi] https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=marriageandfamilies
[vii] https://www.byui.edu/devotionals/scott-gardner
[viii] https://sethadamsmith.com/2013/11/02/marriage-isnt-for-you/
[ix] https://www.lds.org/ensign/1996/04/excerpts-from-recent-addresses-of-president-gordon-b-hinckley?lang=eng
[x] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html
[xi] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html
[xii] https://www.lds.org/ensign/2011/09/repentance-and-forgiveness-in-marriage?lang=eng
[xiii] https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bd/repentance
[xiv] Mosiah 4:26
[xv] https://meridianmag.wpengine.com/should-i-keep-working-on-my-marriage-perspectives-and-tools-at-the-crossroads-of-divorce/
[xvi] https://www.smartmarriages.com/hazardous.html
33 years and counting in NCMarch 6, 2018
After a very trying circumstance myself, let me share a quick example. *I can give personal insight into a VERY happily married couple I know. After more than 60 + years of being in love, raising children, joining the Church and more this couple epitomizes real happiness to almost all who know them. Often I think I wish I'd become like them they are SO happy together... One day while at their home the husband says "Oh she just drives me crazy some days. I can barely take her! I laughed and said "oh yeah? we never noticed. Does she know that?" He tells me "of course, some days she can barely stand me either!" and we both laugh. Then I ask his wife, this dear gal in her 80's if she knows this. "Oh sure" she tells me. "This is what real marriage is all about. Being able to tolerate each other and their silly habits, pet peeves and annoyances you absolutely hate but still love them without that being present in your mind." I think about that and later say to another 30+ year married friend who complained to me that I see it now. More like wanting to kill them (not literally) some days for all their short comings and your own unmet needs BUT yet the idea of a long prison sentence isn't too appealing?! Honestly if you don't have times when your partner exasperates you, frustrates you to the max and you have doubts about them - what world are you living in? The happiest, longest married couples we know still have habits or faults that make their partners go beserk. They just manage their own reactions in a more kind and Christ like way. As President Kimball said "all marriage problems or divorces are the results of selfishness of one or both partners." ~ We all need to learn how to cope better and realize that Satan is doing all he can to destroy marriages since they are the foundation of what families are built upon. Strong families are the basis of society as well; so there you have it. We made a choice when we married as the therapist says - what we do with that choice is up to us. We can plant flowers in a garden or create a mine field of destruction. No matter how long we're married we can do more to make our lives happy. Hard work? sure. Worth it? Yes!!! Your children and grand children will thank you.....
Sister in Christ.March 1, 2018
Dear sister who is struggling. Iâm married a long time too and can relate to my hubby not having deep feelings. At times weâve been distant and other times close. Itâs totalky natural and normal for complete opposites to attract. I learned a long time ago to stop trying to have deep conversations with my man. Thatâs what girlfriends are for. My man loves the child like shallow depth of the gospel and is happiest serving in primary. I decided when I married him that I was not marrying him for his weaknesses but his strengths. Yet his weaknesses, coupled with my own negative attitudes, caused issues for us. Then one night I was reading Alma chapter 32 and when I read the words of planting a âgood seedâ the spirit said to me directly my husband was a âgood seedâ and I began to see the error of my ways. I encourage you to read Alma 32 with the perspective of your husband being a âgood seedâ because he is. Much love as you begin to see your marriage and your man anew. Also, itâs time to forgive yourself and your husband for your very natural slip up before marriage and remember no one really is in love when they get married, they are in deep like with each other. Love is what develops over time and trials. Co sides reading Byron Katieâs book âLoving What isâ it will help you too. God bless your love.