consensus of who we are and where we are going, but the ideology of the market has rushed in to fill the void. Though we have learned how to question hegemonic Western narratives like Christianity, Eurocentrism, science, and patriarchy, we are increasingly encouraged to think of ourselves fundamentally as consumers.
To describe our culture as a “consumer culture” is nothing new, but recognizing the ubiquitous force of consumerism and resisting its influence requires ongoing attention and effort. Consumerism as an ideology is a powerful and complex narrative with distinct values, assumptions, beliefs, and practices that set it in direct, irreconcilable opposition to true love. Consumerism says that the individual consumer is the center of meaning and everything that comes before each one of us—including our relationships—is an object of exchange that can ultimately be directed toward our satisfaction. Consumerism tells us that life is competitive and that love, just like every other valuable commodity, is scarce; that we must guard our interests, preserve our access to resources, and that we should be prepared to toss what we have when something newer and better comes along. We look for a love we think will suit us best, and expect to get just what we want. If we don’t, we walk away. Choosing a relationship becomes no different than choosing a new car: we look at what’s available, what seems interesting, what features we want, what style looks most interesting. I’m not trying to make an argument for or against a certain economic system, but when the values, beliefs, and practices of our culture’s economic system are applied to our most intimate relationships, the results are uniformly destructive.
We live by our narratives, collective and individual, and the more we imbibe the stories of consumer culture, the more we come to live by them. The image-obsessed Hollywood story of passionate, romantic love pulls on us so strongly we start to wonder what’s wrong with our own hum-drum love life; the happy, contented family in the car commercial turns into an ideal that we feel the need to emulate; the clean-shaven, muscular husband from the shaving cream ad and the breathless, seductive wife in the diamond necklace commercial define the roles and expectations of men and women and how spouses ought to display their love for one another.
The Christian narrative, which centers around the sacrificial, self-giving love of Jesus, is ultimately incompatible with the narrative of consumerism, but I think that a lot of us Christians have unconsciously located ourselves first and foremost in the narrative of consumer culture. This comes as no surprise. The ubiquitous messages and images of consumer culture are impossible to ignore and difficult to resist.
This is a book of passionate arguments and honest, true stories in defence of covenantal love. I want to expose the intoxicating consumerist assumptions we breathe in like air, and I want to find, instead, true, life-giving, meaning-filled stories for us to live and love by. I want to write honestly about what real-life marriage is like because I think the truth can shine some light on the sorts of lies that derail and destroy love. I want to tell personal stories of love, failure, confession, forgiveness, and renewal from my real life marriage as some alternatives to the commerce-driven stories that dominate our imagination and so profoundly mark the ways that we live. This book is my attempt to draw a direct line between the metaphors that shape our thinking and how we live our everyday lives and so recover the ancient practice of covenant.
A lot of the marriage books I’ve looked at try to make marriage seem straightforward, or they offer exaggerated promises based on secret knowledge or some special relational technique, and then provide supposedly straightforward steps for a husband and wife to follow to achieve some magical, otherworldly relationship. Psychologists, therapists, medical experts, relationship gurus, sociologists, and theologians all have something to say about marriage, and much of it makes not a stitch of difference in my relationship with my wife. Without question, we can benefit from some of the observations and discoveries of experts, but at the end of the day we need more than the research, statistics, and imperatives of specialists lobbed at us from a safe, clinical distance. We need loving testimony from men and women who are wholeheartedly engaged with the real-life stuff of marriage because marriage is essentially the layperson’s business. Marriage requires the ongoing, willed practice of love, and just like learning to play a musical instrument, simply wanting to be good at it doesn’t accomplish much. There is no substitute for time spent practicing. There are no shortcuts. No amount of expert advice can get us out of the hard work of marriage, and most husbands and wives are everyday people who are painfully aware that they don’t really know what they’re doing, that they’ve stepped onto the stage in a play they know very little about. “We are called to no rehearsals, only public performances,” says Robert Farrar Capon. “Everything that matters has to be read at sight.”[1] Husbands and wives are all amateurs in the truest sense of the word: marrying and living together through whatever life throws our way, for the love of it. I don’t put much stock in the techniques or step-by-step programs because in the end, after the books are highlighted, the seminars wrapped up, and the counseling sessions completed, it’s still the everyday decisions of everyday people living their everyday lives that provides the soil for the kind of strong, particular marriages worthy of our attention. I can tell you that my marriage isn’t perfect, but that’s a silly, hollow confession because a “perfect” marriage doesn’t exist. Perfection implies completion, and our marriages are only ever completed or “accomplished” by a funeral. You can only say that you have finally “succeeded” at being married when you have stayed faithful in love until one of you dies. In marriage, death is the peculiar finishing mark of success.
So here I am, an amateur husband, ten years into marriage, and my relationship with Erika is more surprising, fresh, and mysterious than it has ever been, as strong as the great elm tree in front of our house. I don’t know any rules about how to fix marriages or a formula for how to make them work, but I have tried to observe marriage closely, look at it from different angles and in varying shades of light. I haven’t figured it out, but I doubt that anyone else has either, not even the experts. In a decade of married life, I have discovered that I am susceptible to the same self-made traps that destroy other people’s marriages—resentment, pride, lust, envy, betrayal, selfishness, distrust, greed, unkindness, jealousy, bitterness—some more than others. But in spite of all that, my marriage is somehow healthy, life-giving, surprising, beautiful, consoling, comforting, and challenging, growing stronger every day. Thankfully, marriage is only for imperfect people. If I can do it, I suspect that just about anyone can.
If mapping out a kind of technical user’s manual for marriage, with goals, steps, and techniques, as though it were some kind of machine, betrays the poetic truth of marriage, then the opposite danger of not being concrete enough leads to dreamy, esoteric images of a disembodied ideal that make marriage seem like something best experienced in a trance-like state. God, save us from the champions of the mystical marriage! Marriage is for humans, not angels. We are physical beings, loving our husband or wife in all the commonplace details of day-to-day existence. Marriage, like life itself, is indeed a mystery, but it is inescapably fleshy. It only exists here in this world of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Warning us against the temptation towards escapist, otherworldly spirituality, Scott Cairns writes:
I think that you
forget the very issue which
induced the Christ to take on flesh.
All loves are bodily, require
that the lips part, and press their trace
of secrecy upon the one
beloved— [2]
Marriage takes place with our bodies, which we so often think of as burdens rather than extraordinary, exquisite gifts. But we do not have bodies: we are bodies. Nothing, except perhaps death itself, is a more poignant testimony to the significance of our bodiliness than marriage. The search for the deeper mysteries of marriage is a dangerous distraction if it carries our imagination away from this world and toward some unreal, disembodied ideal. Marriage should draw our attention ever closer to that which is right before us, this lover of flesh and bone, this most intimate other. As the poetic novelist and wise essayist Marilynne Robinson says, “With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”[3] This plunge into the miracle and mystery of marriage is not an escape from this world; it’s a headfirst dive into the deep end of fleshy physicality. And such an intimate encounter with mystery and miracle can