When Your Marriage Doesn't Make You Happy

And why that's more than okay

Thanks for your patience on this week’s post, which is out a day late!

In his book, The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin writes about skyrocketing divorce rates after states passed no-fault divorce laws, first in California under Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969, then in other states, as many quickly followed. Divorce was already on the rise, and this legislation simply accelerated the trend.

Here is a quantitative look at that shockingly swift increase in divorce in the United States, in the second half of the 20^th century. While twenty percent of couples who married in 1950 divorced, 50 percent of couples who married in 1975 divorced. (It looks like some statistics say that divorce rates have been declining since the 1980s, although that decrease seems to apply more to professional, college-educated couples.)

As Levin contends, it wasn’t just that states had made it easier to divorce and mainline churches had liberalized their views on divorce. “It resulted even more from the general rise of individualism in the postwar decades,” Levin writes. (If you’re interested in our trending individualism, listen to my podcast episode with Brad Edwards on his book, The Reason for Church.)

Reading Levin’s chapter on “Subculture Wars,” I straightened up to hear him quoting from University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox: “In this new psychological approach to married life, one’s primary obligation was not to one’s family but to one’s self; hence, marital success was defined not by successfully meeting obligations to one’s spouse and children but by a strong sense of subjective happiness in marriage.”¹

I had been reading Levin’s book for another essay and was not anticipating that it might provide a way into writing about marriage this month. But here was an unexpectedly important insight, about this new psychological approach to married life and our individualistic pursuit of a strong sense of subjective happiness. It seemed to suggest at least one primary obstacle that has made it more difficult to commit to marriage and more straightforward to divorce.

A good marriage is now more defined by the goods that it produces for the individuals within the arrangement, not the goods that might be produced for others besides them.

That’s incredibly shaky ground for marriage.

If you want a guarantee of psychological satisfaction and happiness, I suggest getting a dog, not a lifetime partner to whom you commit in the sight of God.

I’ve been married long enough myself (going on three decades this August) and have been around lots of people married this long and longer to know that no marriage, not even the best ones, delivers consistently on emotional satisfaction. I don’t know of any marriages that deliver consistently on great sex. In fact, I’m betting it’s a rare marriage where one partner isn’t wondering why they thought it a good idea to say I do to the stranger on the other side of the bed. Marriage isn’t always the institution to “protect your peace.”

Marriage, instead, resembles life: with highs and lows, with doldrums and dry seasons. In fact, most of marriage is characterized by a lot of daily ordinariness, which accrues into a lifetime project. Suddenly, the years are many—and you discover that all along, you’ve been building something, however intentionally or unconsciously, however solidly or shakily.

Because your marriage resembles life, it requires a committed love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” If everything were shiny and happy in your marriage, every day as perpetually sunny as San Diego, what would you need to bear and believe, hope and endure? Expectations for marriage are directly related to success in marriage—and the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to expect at least this much, that we will sin and be sinned against, constantly needing habits of return and repair.

To consider another approach to marriage, other than this psychological approach identified in Levin’s book, is to consider another book, such as Christopher Ash’s Marriage: Sex in the Service of God. Just to read the subtitle is to understand that the Christian perspective on marriage is very far removed from any demand that marriage deliver on “a strong sense of subjective happiness.” In Ash’s book, it isn’t the self and its desires that stand at the center of marriage. It’s God—and the service owed to him. This saves us, writes Ash, from “psychologically impossible demands” that pile up because of ideas that are “subjective, romantic, and narcissistic.”

All of life is owed to God, of course. That’s the point of a rule of life, to bring everything into glad and grateful subjection to the one who gifted your very breath and gave for you his very life. Your marriage, in a rule, becomes a central place for attending to your formation and the diligent efforts you make in creative, faithful response to divine grace. As you write a rule, you’re as realistic about yourself and your marriage and your spouse as you are about every other part of your life. You know that the lifetime project of marriage is about daily habits of faithfulness, so small as to seem insignificant. Even and especially the habit of prayer.

In my own rule, I wrote a prayer to characterize some of the vision we’ve cast for our marriage: “Let our marriage reflect the reality of Christ’s love for the church. Give us, O God, a growing unity, a deepening intimacy, and a dynamic of mutual, free, cheerful self-giving. Let us, by the power of your Spirit, bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. Transform each of us, and for the time your work takes, give us patience endurance and unflagging hope. Inspire us with a radically generous kingdom vision, such that the giving of money, time, and emotional and physical energy will be for each of us a source of joy, not begrudging obligation. Let us live into a growing sense of gratitude for each other and the plenty of our lives, and may that constant gratitude become a life chorus of praise.”

In marriage, we stand to discover all that God can do, with two broken, selfish people hell-bent on their happiness. Of course not every marriage survives. And not every marriage should. I’ll give Ash the final word here—because it is a word of gospel grace for all of us: “We cannot overstate the depth at which the Spirit works in the human person. It is easy to understate it . . . God addresses those in whom the image of God is terribly defaced; every facet of their personhood is tainted by sin . . . And at the deepest level of human personhood he changes us. . . Grace changes us.”

That’s good news for marriage—and it’s good news for life.

1. (W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce,” National Affairs, Fall 2009, 83).