Marriage Changes People

The other day, my wife made a comment to me that caught me off guard. She said, “You’re a lot nicer now that we’re married.” This was hard to hear for two reasons. The first was pride. Of course I am! I’ve always been nice. But this thought was immediately followed with shame. You must be joking. I’ve let you down so many times. Both thoughts were based on the same idea that I hadn’t changed. Either I’d always been nice, or I’d never been nice, but I didn’t want to accept the reality that I had changed.

“You’re a lot nicer now that we’re married.”

My Wife, The Other Day

It’s often said that marriage changes people. Typically, this change implies that a person is sweet and tenderhearted before the wedding then sinister and terrible afterward. It’s almost as if we expect people to change for worse once we say “I do.” Making that sacred covenant promise becomes a license to unleash our least favorable qualities. That’s why I was so resistant to admitting I changed since our wedding. Somewhere within my mind I believed change meant I’d become terrible.

The Scriptures have a lot to say about this topic, and rightly so since heaven holds the patent on marriage.

Marriage is a reflection of God.
It might seem that a wedding acts as a right of passage into adulthood. It’s a mile-marker on the long road of life and something that people do once their ready to sit on cruise control. In Genesis we see a different reason for marriage. God created man and woman for each other. At the end of each day of creation, God concluded with the sentiment that all his work was good. When he created man he said “very good.” But the fact that man was alone? “Not good.” So God created man and woman in his own image, together, to be a reflection of their creator. Marriage is not simply something that we do. Men and women were made to be married, to complement one another as one.

A tenderhearted husband.
One of the most difficult things to grasp as a man is what I call “sensitive strength.” The idea of a man being sensitive is counter to the idea of him being strong. But the Bible tells men to be sensitive, to love and be gentle, kind and tenderhearted. This is what true strength looks like. Being a strong man doesn’t mean being distant and insensitive to your wife. One of the many warfronts for a man’s identity happens between God’s definition of being a husband and the world’s.

I don’t think many people would come out and say “a husband shouldn’t be nice.” But the world frequently depicts husbands and fathers in media as being aggressive, abusive or altogether absent from their families. Slowly this depiction becomes familiar then acceptable then expected behavior. What’s worse is the removal of the risk involved in marriage. If a husband fails his wife, she can divorce him as if the marriage never happened. Divorce has become standard practice for American adults, and it has left men without accountability.

The mystery of marriage is revealed.
Perhaps the most profound aspect of marriage is that God worked it into the foundation of his redemptive narrative. One of the great privileges we have living in our era is to look back and see the mysteries that God has revealed. For thousands of years, marriage was shrouded in man’s mind because Christ hadn’t yet performed his work for the church. Paul points this out in his letter to the church in Ephesus, “this mystery, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (ESV, Ephesians 5:2)

Even today, people may wonder: Why is marriage only for one man and one woman? Why is marriage for your whole life and not just temporary or while it’s convenient? Why did God build mankind around the basis of marriage? Perhaps these questions are more relevant in 2019 than they were back then.

But the answer in Scripture is clear. God knew, before the beginning, that he would send his Son to save the world from sin. He founded marriage so that every family formed would feature a husband to point forward to the sacrifice Christ made on the cross. The husband’s call is to put the needs of his wife and family before his own, to be selfless. Although then it was looking ahead, now we can look back and see Christ as the model of what it means to be a husband, “not to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45).

Marriage isn’t simply a tradition. It’s not done for convenience, or to save money on your tax return. Marriage is life-changing. It is a reflection of God’s redemptive story played out in the home. I thank God for those kind words from my wife the other day. It reminded me of the wedding vows we shared only a short time ago. May our marriage bear witness to the beauty of Christ’s love for the world as we live in anticipation of the marriage supper that is to come.