Marital Challenges: Growing Together Throughout Life
(Click here for Spanish) Not long ago my wife and I decided to work together, combining our personal and professional gifts. And after almost 40 years of living together, the clashes that we began to experience in our relationship took us by surprise. We have lived for so long as allies that we assumed that we had overcome our differences and had learned to do everything together. Together we faced the realities of life, we brought up our children, we shared the challenges of our faith and adapted elegantly to the inevitable wearing of our young bodies. Our unity seemed secure, complete, easy… until we tried to work together more closely.
Life, I am learning, is a series of adjustments, renunciations and negotiations. Because what God wants is our sanctification, that is, to make us more like His Son Jesus Christ, and that cannot be attained but through tribulations duly suffered so as to grow. There is not a point in which we can stop growing, rather a daily dying to ourselves, so that we may become progressively that “new creature” which God promises us.
Love requires a life of adaptation to our neighbor. And if our neighbor is of a different culture, as it is the case in our “mixed marriage”, all the more difficult, since it adds to the normal trials of life. After the honeymoon we learn how to live in peace. Living with another is not easy, nor is it earning a living, living within our means, choosing common friends and learning to understand, accept and love our new family (our spouse’s).
Then comes the birth of our first child. We have to negotiate how to care, bring up, instruct and discipline children. And as they grow, we make new friends with couples that have children of similar ages so as to support one another and give our children good friends.
Then comes the school age, where we have to filter the values, backgrounds and temperaments of others, the requirements of the school district, the influences of teachers and fellow students upon our children. We both have to teach them how to live in society, and do it together, combining strengths, and avoiding the temptation to divide ourselves, being that we are so different.
And what to say of the puberty, adolescence and youth of our children? Our “precious ones” suddenly become these incomprehensible strangers that live in our homes. They now develop their own opinions, tastes, friendships and decisions, which we can neither control nor understand, as we did until that time. This is a difficult stage for both parents and children, since we all feel equally inadequate.
Each crisis, each disagreement and divergence forces us to appeal to the Divine Arbiter, so that He can show us the better way and may restore our unity around His will (and not ours). If we do not insist, intentionally, in putting God in the middle of our differences (and let us remember that in a Christian marriage He IS in our midst!) our flesh will find a thousand ways to divide us subtly. We might not divorce (although some so resolve it in their heart, long before putting it into practice). Others resolve our differences by establishing a “division of labor” that then becomes two exclusive jurisdictions and later parallel lives. We live together, but not completely united. And, to reinforce that division, we establish “no man´s lands”, mined fields where no one ventures.
Despite the sweet unity which we enjoyed, it should not have surprised my wife and I that the challenge of working together should destabilize once again the relative peace that we preferred. We frequently forget that following Christ is not easy: “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” (Lucas 9:23). The search for a life without problems is a dangerous illusion.