SCL

I’m married, and if you are too, then statistically speaking, one of us is going to get a divorce.

I’m not writing that to be sensational, but I just want to be clear that it’s a big deal. And I don’t know if we Christians do a very good job of treating it as such.

Look at it this way: if one out of every two neighbors on your street got mauled by a bear, would you be more careful about bears? Would you buy books on how to keep your house safe from bears? Would you carry a gun and bear spray if there were in fact such a thing as bear spray? Probably. Yet, when it comes to divorce, we don’t do many equivalent things. And the ratios are equally as high as that bear scenario.

When was the last time you and your wife visited a counselor for just a tune up? What was the last book the two of you read together to strengthen your marriage? If you have kids, how many dates do you go on every month?

I fail at most of those things, so please don’t read finger-pointing in this post. My wife and I have far more fake dates at home (dinner after the kids are in bed) than real dates and for Valentine’s Day we got each other a hot water heater. It’s a “State Select” model which I’ve been assured is one of the sexier hot water heaters available. The finger is pointed at me. I just think divorce is something we should think about and maybe work on changing in our generation.

(This was one of the earliest posts I wrote on this site and felt appropriate for the tail end of love month.)

p.s. What’s the best marriage advice you ever heard? Mine was that “In most relationships there is a “how person” and a “wow person.” When the wow person tells the how person ‘I’ve got a crazy idea, we should start a business and then learn how to paint and then go camping, etc, etc, etc, the how person will ask questions like ‘where will we get the money for that, what about your job, when would we have the time?’ They think they’re contributing to the conversation but the wow person often takes it as an attack against the idea. So instead of saying “how” when a wow person comes up with a lot of ideas, the how person should say “wow” because the reality is that the wow person is going to execute maybe 1 out of 100 of the ideas and just wants to share the overflow of ideas with his wife. I’m the wow person in our marriage and my wife is the how. And that simple idea really rocked our world. John Woodall at North Point preached on that once.

So what’s the best marriage advice you ever heard?

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