On Marriage

A little elder wisdom

I was 18 when my father died suddenly in the spring of my freshman year at Wheaton College. Thirteen months later, my mother remarried a tall, kind widower from our church. Before his Parkinson’s diagnosis more than a decade later, the two of them had many wonderful years together. I can still picture my mother on my stepfather’s lap after breakfast, her arms hugging his neck and giggling like a schoolgirl.

What a gift that God gave both my mother and her second husband such happiness after such heartache. That tall, kind man walked me down the aisle the day of my wedding, and I remember his many kindnesses to my mother and to me, especially in the wake of my brother’s suicide just two years later. He died the week we closed on our house in Cincinnati almost four years ago, and we still miss him.

My mother’s second wedding plotted a redemptive arc of a new life for her—and it also signaled an end to life as I’d known it. I grew up quickly. I think now of all the consequential decisions I faced in my twenties, feeling a little alone. Did I marry this long-haired, bearded man I’d fallen in love with under the African moon, the summer after my junior year of college? Did I take seriously the invitation to consider a PhD when I was pregnant and finishing my master’s thesis? What considerations were important as we decided to purchase our first home? What did it feel like to start a family—and how could I transition well into motherhood?

My father was gone and could not be consulted on these routine affairs of adulting. My mother, never one to give advice, was blissfully occupied. I don’t even know if I measured the loss then as much as I do now.

It’s why, to the best of my ability, I’m trying to be present in this season both to my own adulting children as well as to a small group of young women from my church. I remember those daunting, weighty questions of my twenties, and I want to, if not give advice exactly, then share some of my experiences with those I love and mentor. I want them to know that it’s going to take a lifetime to grow into the wisdom they need for this one wild and precious life God has given to them. I want them to know it’s okay to feel scared when, for the first time, you’re filing taxes or applying for a mortgage, figuring out what to do about a broken furnace or a dating relationship.

As best I can, I am living into the role of the elder. I’m not exactly old—and I’m not exactly young either. I’ve been married for almost three decades. I’ve raised five children. I’ve seen a few things. I may not capably work a TV remote (as some of my young friends can attest), but I can counsel you on weightier matters.

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One of the things that causes so much angst in young twenty-somethings is marriage. How will I know he or she is the right one? Oh, how I wish there were a formula for that. If only marriage were like choosing the best option off a dinner menu. If only there were an ingredient list for that special someone—and you could say, with confidence, I don’t like cilantro. But this isn’t what marriage is like at all, at least not what it is like in the wear-and-tear of years.

The only certain thing you choose when you marry someone is the certainty of change. Prayerfully, you want to seek a commitment—and a friendship—that will sustain you through all the beauty and brokenness of life. A health diagnosis. A bunch of kids. A job layoff. An incredible career success. You want a friendship that weathers the change that will inevitably befall both of you, a friendship that is committed to remembering the beauty and good you saw when you were falling in love—and forgetting the many lapses since.

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that certain proofs will be relatively unimportant in your dating process. Your enneagram numbers won’t actually matter all that much, even if they might tell you a little bit about the nature of your partnership. Your birth order won’t be useful data. You can do your StrengthsFinder and Working Genius assessments and learn some revelatory things about yourselves. But you can’t count on a personality test to assure you that you are—or are not—made for each other. A marriage is something to be made together, with the help of God.

Marriage is like every other part of the Christian life. If you are a person of faith and dating in this season of your life, you have to exercise trust in the God who sees and knows all and who is committed to your good. You have to seek trusted input from elders and peers within your Christian community, who will be committed to honestly reflecting on the relative strength or weakness of your partnership, as they perceive it. You have to pray, perhaps fast, and seek wisdom in the Scriptures. And then you will have to leap, putting the weight of what you hope to be a lifetime’s worth of effort into the risky business of covenant commitment. (I don’t think this means a lot of agonizing years of indecision, by the way.)

Once you leap, you begin to realize that marriage is like a lot of other enterprises: you get better at it as you practice the essential skills. In marriage, these are the skills of bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, and enduring all things. (Don’t imagine you’ll have the skills perfected before you’ve even said I do. Skills are developed by use.)

These are skills of saying you’re sorry. Of taking responsibility for your actions. Of seeking the other’s good. Of saying thank you. Of expressing your desires. Of making time and space for intimacy. Of telling the truth. Of humbly seeking to hear the truth. Of daily kindnesses and ordinary courtesies. Of self-giving, even when you’re tired and frustrated, maybe a little angry. Of being angry—and refusing the acts of anger that aren’t easily repaired.

Sometimes only one partner gets good at the skills, and the marriage suffers neglect, betrayal, rupture, disintegration. That’s the hardest part, this reality that marriage is a work of partnership. It’s not something that can be easily carried alone. But here, too, we see our Savior Jesus, comforting us in all our griefs and carrying our sorrows when marriage fails. “Your experiences will vary,” writes John Newton in one letter to John Ryland, “but his love and promises are always unchangeable.”

Writing to Ryland about his own marriage, Newton describes what it’s like to have arrived at year thirty-six of marriage. “A long time in prospect, but short upon a review, except I consult my memory and my books, and examine it by piecemeal. Then I perceive it must have required many years, to pass through so many turns and changes in life and connections as we have seen. We have reason to say,’ Mercy and goodness have followed, accompanied, and surrounded us all the way.’”

Newton continues: “Our setting out in wedded life was something like that of an adventurous mariner, who should put to sea without either pilot or compass. We knew and thought but little of the Lord, but he thought of us, his plan was exceedingly different from that we had formed for ourselves, but it gradually opened upon us and hitherto he has helped us. What is before us we know not, but he knows it all, and I am enabled in some measure to cast the care upon him,” (165).

I like that image of the adventurous mariner, which was, of course, borrowed from the years Newton had spent at sea. In other words, you can’t chart the path—not in dating and any other part of life.

Ultimately, that’s probably for your best—because you could be tricked into thinking safety and certainty are better than risk and trust.

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On My Bookshelf

Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (New York: Penguin Random House, 2025).

John M. Gottman, The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert (New York: Harmony, 2015).

Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023).

Scrolling Ourselves to Death, edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025).

New and Noteworthy

Claude Atcho, Rhythms of Faith: A Devotional Pilgrimage Through the Church Year (New York: Waterbrook, 2025).