PRAISE FOR

THE GOOD, THE MESSY, AND THE BEAUTIFUL

The Joys and Struggles of Real Married Life

Beth and Edward Sri reveal their hearts to us in this beautiful blend of testimony and practical theology. This book is a treasure! Read it and share it!

–Bobby and Jackie Angel, authors of Pray, Decide, and Don’t Worry

Authentic, inspiring, and real. Edward and Beth Sri have poured their hearts, souls, and decades of experience into a book that is sure to be a real source of encouragement to couples everywhere. What a gift to read their stories and insights and begin to see my own marriage for what it truly is—a messy and beautiful gift from God!

–Danielle Bean, host of Girlfriends and author of Whisper: Finding God in the Everyday

Finally, a book that offers practical advice for real (non-Instagramy) marriages. This book will help married people feel less alone in the struggles they face and give them hope that Christ is calling them to a deeper, more joyful, more profound union.

–Cameron Fradd, creator and host of Among the Lilies

This book should be in every home. In fact, you might want to buy two—one for you and one for your spouse. The Good, the Messy, and the Beautiful is written from rich experience of marriage, with all its joys and with all the challenges that are especially characteristic of our times. In Edward’s and Beth’s struggles, and through their counsel, so many couples will find healing, encouragement, and light. We sure did.

–Scott and Kimberly Hahn, authors of Rome Sweet Home

The Good, the Messy, and the Beautiful is a refreshingly honest take on the lived realities of married life. Often our pews are filled with couples quietly struggling to live their marriages fully. While each couple experiences their own unique trials, Beth and Edward’s witness invites all couples to lean into both the joys and struggles of married life in a profoundly transformative way. Whether ministering to other couples or deepening your own relationship, this book is a real gift.

–Edward Herrera, executive director, Institute for Evangelization, Archdiocese of Baltimore

As a society we tend to lie to young people about marriage; we present a version which isn’t messy or costly. Edward and Beth Sri show us that real love is more demanding and yet so much better than the airbrushed image advertised by popular culture. This book will help anyone who wants the real joy of marriage rather than a cheap counterfeit.

–Fr. Brian Larkin, pastor, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic parish, Denver, Colorado

In The Good, the Messy, and the Beautiful, Edward and Beth Sri “pull back the curtain” on the inner workings of marriage and show through their own inspiring witness how the wounds and weaknesses a couple brings to marriage (and every couple does!) are not just stumbling blocks and certainly don’t doom couples to unhappiness or failure. Instead, God meets us in the mess and, through this beautiful sacrament, brings husbands and wives bountiful healing and ever-deeper joy. What an encouragement this book is for every married couple and especially to those who doubt that their marriage is worth the effort.

–Dr. Daniel and Bethany Meola, founders, Life-Giving Wounds

Dr. Edward and Beth Sri have their finger on the pulse of what every young adult needs to hear if they are married or plan to get married one day. Amidst all the confusion and noise in our world today about dating and marriage, they lead all who encounter them in a beautiful, but honest, look at the messiness and the goodness of marriage. One who picks up this book and reads it will think, “I wish someone had told me that beforehand.” We need more theologically sound and refreshingly honest voices like the two of them provide in this book. I will be recommending it to all the young adults in the Archdiocese of New York.

–Colin Nykaza, director of young adult outreach, Archdiocese of New York

Dr. Edward and Beth Sri have written a deep, personal invitation for you to see and grow your married life head to heart, body and soul. We have long trusted and admired their ability to publicly share their inner married life with a humble examen in light of the beautiful ideals of our faith, particularly the Theology of the Body. This was the real gift they gave that delighted our community of over sixty thousand members in both the EPIC Intimacy series and the Catholic Marriage Summit. Now, The Good, the Messy, and the Beautiful captures even more deeply their joyful and authentic witness to what it takes to “get the marriage you want.” This book will be one of our most recommended resources for years to come!

–Damon and Melanie Owens, founders, Joyful Ever After

Beth and Edward Sri have given a great gift to married couples in all stages of married life. This book is filled with stories about their own lived experiences and the difficulties and hardships of marriage. They give witness that when we allow God to meet us in the daily joys, challenges, and messiness of real married life, he can use those to transform our hearts and sanctify us through them. By living what they call “the little way of marriage,” couples can have hope for their own marriage. Within their testimony, the Sris contend that when couples realize that it is specifically by working through the challenging moments of marriage and by bringing Christ into those moments that real transformation and purification can take place. Through the grace present in their sacrament, spouses can elevate their marriage commitment to a totally different level of intimacy, one that few couples ever dream of having and even fewer ever think is possible to attain.

–Jake Samour, director, Office of Marriage and Family Life, Diocese of Wichita

There’s an old joke often heard at weddings regarding the three rings of marriage: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the “suffering.” And while there certainly is truth in that punch line, oftentimes today, when it comes to discussions or even homilies on marriage, most of the emphasis deals with the struggles of marriage rather than the deep joy that comes from the sacrament. And that’s why The Good, the Messy, and the Beautiful is such an important book for both engaged and married couples. Edward and Beth writing together remind their readers, from real-life experiences, why God’s plan for marriage is one that, when followed, is the absolute best plan. The ups and downs are all part of an incredible journey husband and wife make together, helping each other on the way to heaven. The messy often results in more goodness and more beauty that can set powerful examples in a society so in need of real love that stands the test of time.

–Teresa Tomeo, host of Catholic Connection and cohost of The Catholic View for Women

Beth and Edward strike a rare blend of accessible theological insight and practical advice in The Good, the Messy, and the Beautiful. Their insight is wrapped in wit and wisdom with the masculine and feminine voices coming together in an enjoyable read!

–Mary-Rose Verret, cofounder, Witness to Love

© 2022 Ascension Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical reviews, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture passages are from the Revised Standard Version–Second Catholic Edition © 2006 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Ascension

PO Box 1990

West Chester, PA 19380

1-800-376-0520

ascensionpress.com

Cover design: Rosemary Strohm

ISBN 978-1-954881-28-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-954881-37-2 (e-book)

To Curtis and Michaelann Martin

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Realities of Marriage

2. A Deeper Love

3. Two Kinds of Love

4. Back to the Garden: What We Really Long for in Marriage

5. Living in Separate Bedrooms … of the Heart

6. Total Acceptance

7. Healing: Your Upbringing Impacts You More Than You Think

8. Dealing with Differences

9. A Woman’s Heart

10. Men Are Not Mind Readers

11. Finding Time for Prayer: The Heartbeat of Your Marriage

12. Beautiful Limitations: You Build a Life, and Then It Builds You

13. First Things First: Giving Your Best to Your Vocation

Conclusion

Appendix: A Few Words on Intimacy

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Notes

Introduction

Edward: A friend of mine was in the sacristy of the church on his wedding day, waiting alone in the final minutes before the ceremony began. His best man came to check on him one last time. The best man, who had been married with children for several years, walked into the sacristy, gave the groom a serious stare for a few moments, and then started laughing at him.

Perplexed, the groom asked, “I’m about to get married … Why are you laughing at me?”

The best man replied, “That’s just it—you don’t know!”

That’s true for all of us. We don’t know what we’re really getting into when we get married. Indeed, nothing can fully prepare us for all the realities we will face in our vocation. We have to be thrown deep into the mystery of the other person, and the mystery of our relationship together, to appreciate what it’s really all about—the joys, the sorrows, the unexpected trials, the unanticipated blessings; how much it will demand of us; how much it will transform us; how we will be stretched like never before; and how much our hearts will expand as we take on the heart of Christ.

In our years of working with young people, Beth and I have heard many devout Catholic couples express how surprised they were when stresses, tensions, and hurts came up in their relationship. This can happen a few months, a few years, or a few kids into their marriage. They were not expecting this level of difficulty, and they think they’re the only ones struggling.

“No one ever told us how hard marriage really is.”

“Before we were married, we thought to ourselves, ‘Our faith is important to us. We pray, we love Jesus, we go to adoration … Our marriage will be great …’ But we were shocked that we could have all that and still have many struggles in our marriage.”

“Two very different people—who think differently, look at the world differently, communicate differently, process things differently—coming together for this relationship? It’s crazy hard!”

“I never realized how selfish I was … until I got married.”

You can go through the best marriage preparation program; pray countless rosaries, novenas, and holy hours for your marriage; study the Church’s teachings on marriage and family; have amazing mentor couples to learn from; and even memorize the Theology of the Body … and you still will not have any idea of what marriage is really all about and what it will do to you until you are deep into it.

This is both the beauty and the challenge of marriage. St. Francis de Sales underscores how marriage is the only vocation in which people take a vow before any kind of novitiate. In religious life, there is a long period of preparation, formation, and much practical experience in living with the community one is entering. A novice gets to try it out for a while, to see if this is what he wants to do for the rest of his life before making final vows. As St. Francis de Sales explains, marriage is vastly different. The couple is immediately thrown into the deep end together—and it is for the rest of their lives. “In marriage, one takes a vow. But it is the only instance where a vow is taken without a novitiate. If it had a year of novitiate, how few would enter into it.”1

The following saying applies most beautifully to marriage: “You build a life, and then it builds you.” This is what happens when man and woman come together in the sacrament of Matrimony. They decide to build a life together in marriage. And that decision—and the daily commitment to be faithful to that decision—is what God uses to form and bless the couple more than anything else in their lives. Indeed, it is precisely through the challenges, difficulties, and trials of ordinary, daily married life that God wants to transform us with his love and make us more like him.

Getting Your Spouse to Heaven?

There is a journey God wants to take you on in marriage. He uses your vocation, more than almost anything else, to form you, shape you, mold you, sanctify you. Jesus doesn’t just want to meet you in the chapel, in the sacraments, or in your daily prayer time. One of the most important places Jesus wants to meet you is in your vocation—in your spouse and children. It is the main instrument Jesus uses to draw your attention to your imperfections, work on your weaknesses and sins, and invite you to grow in virtue. It’s the key setting in which he calls you to be healed of your wounds and makes you whole. Most of all, it’s the number one place he sanctifies you, calling you to love like he loves.

Edward: When I was single, I heard the idea that Christian marriage is all about getting your spouse to heaven. So, when Beth and I got engaged, that noble ideal inspired me. I wanted to take my role as a Christian husband very seriously: I envisioned living my married days praying for Beth, praying with Beth, making little sacrifices for her, and making sure that she prayed every day and had time for faith formation in her women’s group and frequented the sacraments. I would be an amazing Catholic husband, leading my family in prayer, in catechesis, and most of all by my example. I was going to be a spiritual leader in our home. “That’s my mission, after all—to help Beth get to heaven!”

Over time, however, I realized that the main way I help Beth get to heaven has little to do with my high ideals of being a great Catholic husband and spiritual leader in the home. The main way I actually help Beth get to heaven is this: every day of her life, Beth has to deal with me!

Every day, she has to deal with my many imperfections, faults, and sins. My forgetfulness. My impatience. My selfishness. My pride. My quirks and idiosyncrasies. She has to deal with me hurting her or letting her down—when I say something with that tone of voice. When I forget to say thank you. When I’m overwhelmed and dump my stress on her. When I don’t think things through as carefully as I should. Given the many weaknesses she has to encounter in me every day, I’m sure Beth gets many centuries off of purgatory!

I say this in a somewhat joking way, but there is a profound truth to this. In marriage, God brings two fallen human beings together for this intense, lifelong union. In that union, all our imperfections come out. We often misunderstand each other. We hurt each other. We let each other down. In marriage and family life, we have countless opportunities to love as Jesus loves us. To love freely, completely like he did—even when he got nothing back in return.

Think about how Jesus felt on Good Friday, which is when he modeled love for us the most. He felt forgotten, unappreciated, misunderstood, misrepresented, uncared for, unloved, controlled, hurt, ridiculed, rejected, abandoned. Many of those same feelings and trials are experienced in marriage. We need to view these not merely as frustrating situations but as encounter moments—opportunities to encounter Jesus and love him in our spouse.

Your “Stuff” Rising to the Surface

Beth: Marriage has a way of drawing out the best and the worst of us—and that’s all a part of the beautiful process of what God wants to do in us through this sacrament. It reminds me of bone broth.

Each December, we buy from some Benedictine sisters here in Colorado half a cow’s worth of beef to freeze for the year for our large family. Each year, the sisters ask if we want the soup bones, and I enthusiastically say, “Yes! We can use them to make bone broth!”

Bone broth is amazing. It contains many important vitamins and minerals, and it’s so good for you, especially when you are sick. But it takes a long time to make. You have to soak the bones in vinegar for a while and then put them in a pot with seasoning and water and let it simmer for twenty-four hours. The slow simmer gradually pulls all the good nutrients out of the bones and they become part of the broth. But the simmer also pulls out the bad stuff: over time, all the nasty impurities—the scum—from the bones rise to the surface, and you have to scrape it off to have the healthy bone broth to serve.

This is exactly what marriage is. Marriage is the slow simmer of God drawing out of us all that is good. But in the process, the bad stuff in us also has to come out—our sins, weaknesses, bad habits, hurts from the past, dysfunctional ways of interacting with others—all that has to be brought to the surface and scraped off. Over the course of many years—through the daily joys and difficulties, kindnesses and hurts, disappointments and unexpected acts of service, acts of sacrifice, acts of love—God is slowly drawing out all the good in my husband and all the good in me. The Lord is also pulling out all that is bad in him and all that is bad in me, so that we can be purified together.

“The Little Way of Marriage”

But we do not always see this beautiful process of purification and healing in the midst of the daily struggles of marriage and family life, when we feel exhausted and stretched like never before. So, if you ever happen to face a “Dark Night” in your marriage, do not panic. Be assured that almost all devout Catholic couples have certain low moments when they wonder, “Why is this happening?” “How did we get here?” “Why is this so hard?” In those moments, realize that you are exactly where you need to be. This is not an accident, some big mistake. Jesus knew when you said “I do” that this dark night of suffering would come. He knew he wanted to step into your marriage in a more profound way at this point. He wants to meet you in this moment and draw more good out of you. And he may also want to bring to the surface some things in you that need to be purified—some scum that needs to be scraped away so you can be transformed and healed. Are you willing to meet Jesus in this way in your marriage?

When we feel completely stretched in marriage and family life, when we experience our poverty in a very real, profound way and we come to know deep in our hearts the truth that we don’t have what it takes to live this vocation—when we reach a low point and feel empty and have nothing left to give—it is then that Jesus can do his most amazing work in us, transforming us and our marriages in the most profound way. We call this “the Little Way of Marriage.”2 When we cry out to the Lord in our emptiness, he can’t help but come down and fill that spot, fill that inadequacy, fill that hurt, fill that weakness. The key is admitting we’re broken, confused, and hurt and giving the Lord permission to step more deeply into our individual souls and our relationship together as a couple. Jesus can’t hold back when we cry out to him. He meets us in our weaknesses and helps make up for what we lack.

This book is about this journey of transformation God wants to take us on in our marriages as we step-by-step learn to take on the heart of Christ. For that is what marriage is about. God did not bring us together as husband and wife so that he can make me feel good about myself, make me feel not alone, fulfill me, or make me happy. This is not what a vocation is. A vocation is not about what someone does for me. It’s about giving myself away in love and finding a deeper purpose, meaning, healing, happiness, and holiness precisely through the thousand daily little acts of service and sacrifice that real love demands. Again, it’s all about the bone broth. A truly simmering marriage isn’t about rekindling romantic feelings and passions. It is about humbly allowing Jesus to draw all the good out of us through the challenges of the spousal relationship and allowing him to bring to the surface the weaknesses, wounds, and sins he wants to heal in us. It is all about that process of deepening and purifying our love.

1

The Realities of Marriage

There is a chip on our bedroom wall that looks a bit like a scar, the mark of a wound in our marriage. Though we’ve done countless projects repairing blemishes in our home, this is one we intend to keep. For it reminds us as a couple of the work God has done in our marriage, bringing healing in our hearts and a deeper unity and trust that we otherwise would never have experienced if we did not have the wake-up call God gave us that night when we left that unfortunate nick on the wall.

The details of that night are not important. Suffice it to say, there were misunderstandings, a tone of voice, hurt feelings, unkind words, emotional responses, tears, and worst of all, feelings of helplessness, bewilderment, and despair. How did we ever reach this point? Will this ever get better?

We want to be clear—what happened was nothing close to a marriage crisis situation. We were totally committed to each other and loved each other deeply. On many levels we had a happy, thriving marriage. The events that took place that night are the kinds of things that happen in many marriages, even among those who are devout Christians. Still, this was a very painful moment, a low point in our spousal relationship. For us, the wicker basket thrown against the wall in frustration was not just the result of an argument. It was the culmination of months of underlying tension, years of certain patterns of relating to each other, and decades of personal habits forged from our upbringing.

It was also a key turning point for the healing God wanted to do in our hearts.

The Lord had been working in our lives long before this difficult exchange. We both were raised Catholic and became serious about our faith in our college years. We fell in love while doing missionary work together. We were committed Christians, faithful to the Church’s teachings, devoted to daily prayer and the sacraments. We were intentional in raising our children in virtue and the Faith.

We both had degrees in theology and studied the Church’s teachings on marriage and the family. We saw marriages falling apart in the secular world and wanted to do something different. We set out to build our marriage on Christ. We were going to do it all the “Catholic way.” We loved Jesus. We loved each other. We didn’t need anything else. We were going to show the rest of the world the truth about what Venerable Fulton Sheen once said: it takes “three to get married.”3

And our marriage was truly blessed—with joy, with wonderful children, with true friendship, and with a profound sense of being on mission together, in our home with our kids, with the college students where Edward taught, and with the Catholic organizations we served. But there was also a certain tension that emerged from time to time, slowly at first, in a very subtle way, barely noticeable underneath the happiness, adventures, graces, and laughter of our growing family life. Like most marriages, there were the occasional stresses and misunderstandings—hurt feelings, selfishness, sincere apologies, forgiveness, reconciliation. Even a touch of resentment could sometimes creep in: “Why doesn’t he get it?” “Doesn’t she understand?” “He’s never going to change.” “I can never be good enough!” Moments like these would arise from time to time but then would eventually pass.

But after a while, they started to increase in frequency … and in volume. All the theology, devotions, and best of intentions could not cover up the fact that we were far from living the ideal Catholic marriage we originally envisioned for ourselves. We were having struggles. And we thought we were the only ones.

Two Dimensions of Love

We came to our marriage with hearts full of genuine love. We had many dreams and hopes for our life together and a sincere desire to honor and serve each other and always put the other person first. Those years of falling in love and building our new life together were truly beautiful. But, as in all marriages, that initial love was not enough. And it was far from perfect. We each brought our own baggage, weaknesses, and wounds into our marriage. Selfishness. Pride. Unspoken expectations. Harbored resentments. Hurts from our past. Fears. Trust issues. Unconscious triggers. Dysfunctional habits. False stories we told about ourselves and those around us.

All that tainted the sincere love we had for each other. And those imperfections didn’t magically go away on our wedding day just because we had a beautiful dress, tuxedo, and ceremony. Even the grace of the sacrament we received could not immediately cover up those deep defects and wounds in our souls. As the Catholic saying goes, “grace builds on nature.” And between the two of us, there was a lot of fallen human nature that God’s grace needed to heal before he could bring our relationship to a whole new level. It’s as if there were cracks and fissures in the foundation of our individual natures. The graces were there, but our nature needed some repair and restoration.

Indeed, the initial love in our marriage was like the first wine at the wedding at Cana. The wine that was first served at the feast was delightful. It was thoroughly enjoyed. But it was not enough and eventually ran out. In first-century Jewish culture, to run out of wine at a wedding feast was not just a simple embarrassment, like running out of beer at your Super Bowl party. It would have been a social catastrophe. For in a culture of honor and shame, the family hosting the feast would immediately fall from their social status in the community and be shamed for generations to come. You can imagine the many emotions when the family started to realize the impending disaster: shock, anger, blame, panic, shame. How could this happen? Who is responsible for this? What will people think of us? What were you thinking? No other family has ever faced such an embarrassing problem like this! What will become of us?

In the midst of this crisis, Jesus steps in and miraculously provides new wine. But notice how he doesn’t just fix the problem. He offers the couple and their family something new, something different, something so much better than anything they could have ever imagined. First, consider the sheer quantity of wine. The Gospel says there were six stone jars for Jewish ritual purification at the wedding feast. Those are not your half-gallon Mason jars of today. Each of those jars could hold about twenty gallons of water. Jesus had those jars filled to the brim and then changed all that water into wine. So that is one hundred twenty gallons of wine—talk about a party! Such an abundance would certainly go the distance and endure even the longest possible wedding feast.

But it is not just the amount of wine that is amazing. The best part of the miracle has to do with the quality of wine Jesus produced. His wine was not only better than the initial wine served for the feast; it far surpassed anyone’s expectations and surely would have received a perfect hundred-point rating! This is why the head waiter gave the family such a high compliment: “Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10). What a surprise, happy ending to a dramatic story! What looked like a crisis was now bliss because of what Jesus did that day.

What Jesus did at Cana, he also wants to do in our marriages. He wants to transform our initial love in marriage into something so much better. Indeed, the initial love we bring to our marriages—no matter how sincere, powerful, and even faith filled it may be—is like that first wine at Cana. It is far from perfect. And it will not last. No matter how good your marriage prep program was; no matter how committed you are to each other, to your faith, and to the vision of Christian marriage; no matter how much you pray or learn about the Theology of the Body … your initial love will not be enough. On its own, it will not go the distance and carry you through the many trials you will face together in life. It must be changed. It needs to be purified. It must be healed.

So if we start to notice the first wine in our marriage beginning to run out—when we notice our selfishness and wounds getting in the way of the love we want to give our spouse, when we start to experience deeper tension, isolation, frustration, and hurts—we may feel great panic like the family did at Cana. (“What’s happening?”) We might find ourselves surprised, even shocked, at first. (“Us? This is happening to us?”) We might be tempted to compare ourselves to other couples. (“No one else has problems like we do.”) We might be tempted to become bitter, discouraged, or ashamed. (“Why are we having all these troubles? I don’t see how this is ever going to get better.”)

In these moments, do not be afraid. The chaos and messiness of married life are actually normal. Like at Cana, Jesus wants to step in and work a miracle, but one that’s even greater than changing water into wine. He wants to heal our selfish, wounded hearts and transform them into hearts like his. As Pope Benedict once said, comparing the story of Cana to the story of all marriages, “The first wine is very fine: this is falling in love. But it does not last until the end: a second wine has to come later, it has to ferment and grow, to mature. The definitive love that can truly become this ‘second wine’ is more wonderful still, it is better than the first wine. And this is what we must seek.”4

That certainly has been the case in our own marriage: our initial, genuine love for each other was not enough to carry us through the realities of married life. It needed much healing and purification. Though we have come a long way since that night when the nick was left on the wall, we know God still has much more work to accomplish in our hearts. But we can truly say that the Lord has transformed our relationship over the years, bringing it to a much deeper level of unity, trust, and friendship that we never could have achieved on our own. What is most important to emphasize here, however, is that the Lord accomplished this work by meeting us precisely in the hurts and trials of our spousal relationship—not in spite of them. We have found that, like at Cana, those areas of lack in our marriage—lack of understanding, lack of trust, lack of forgiveness, lack of closeness—actually have become areas of abundance: an abundance of a deeper, Christ-like love. This is what Jesus, the miracle-worker, did at Cana, and it is what he has done in the lives of countless, ordinary Christian couples throughout the centuries. Indeed, the wounds we all have in our spousal relationships, if healed, can become profoundly life-giving. Jesus just wants us to meet him in those difficult areas of our marriage where the initial wine is running out in order to sanctify us and give us something so much better.

God Is Calling You

Falling in love is easy. Growing in love together is a lot harder. That is the reality of married life. Real married life is super hard, super messy, and super beautiful all at the same time. And that is what this book is about—the realities of your marriage. Not the self-imposed ideals you set for yourself when you got started. Not the image you like to present to your friends and family. Not the perfect picture of your marriage you post on social media. But the realities of your marriage: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. For that is where God meets you.

Here is a quote from one of our heroes, St. John Paul II. No one else in the last century dedicated his life, ministry, and teaching to marriage and family—and impacted the world with the Christian vision for marriage and family—more than St. John Paul II. We will share more from the wisdom of John Paul II and how he has shaped our marriage, but for starters, here’s one foundational insight about the realities of marriage that we always come back to:

God, who called the couple to marriage, continues to call them in marriage. In and through the events, problems, difficulties and circumstances of everyday life, God comes to them, revealing and presenting the concrete “demands” of their sharing in the love of Christ for His Church in the particular family, social and ecclesial situation in which they find themselves.5

Feel the weight of this important point: The God who called you together in marriage continues to call you in your marriage. His call was not just one time, long ago. He continues to call you precisely in “the events, problems, difficulties and circumstances” of daily married life. And we all know there are plenty of events, problems, difficulties, and circumstances to go around in each of our marriages! Indeed, the tension you might experience with your spouse—the moments of frustration, disappointment, hurt feelings, sorrow, lack of understanding—these are not merely problems to be solved. They are certainly not difficulties to run away from, avoid, and build walls around. These are the very places Jesus is waiting to meet you. Right there in those challenges. Jesus is wanting to meet you. And he is inviting you to love him in your spouse, with all your spouse’s defects, wounds, and sins. Marriage is a school of love—it’s one of the most important places where Jesus wants to form us, change our hearts, and make our hearts like his. In the realities and messiness of everyday married life, Jesus is inviting us to expand our hearts and love like he did on the Cross. For that is what the sacrament of holy Matrimony is all about—a deeper participation in the love of Christ himself, the one total, perfect act of self-giving love for which our hearts were made.

Reflection Questions

What is one challenging area in your marriage right now where you think Jesus is calling you to meet him more? How might you be tempted to run away from this challenge? How do you think Jesus wants you to love your spouse more in this area?

At Cana, Jesus stepped into the situation of a lack of wine and worked a miracle. Do you believe Jesus can step into your marriage and make up for whatever you think is lacking? What are some ways you can let Jesus into your marriage more and allow him to fill it with a greater love?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: The love you have for your fiancé(e) right now may be beautiful, but it will not be enough to sustain your marriage. God wants to deepen and strengthen your love through the unexpected trials, hurts, and difficulties you will face together in the future. You can prepare for those bigger unknown challenges by developing the habit of working through the smaller difficulties you face today.

So ask yourself: What is one thing that your fiancé(e) sometimes does that hurts or frustrates you? How free do you feel to talk to him or her about it? How can you bring it up in a way that is not accusatory but is clear? Then ask your fiancé(e): What is something I do that hurts you or lets you down? Is there anything I can do to change to love you better?

2

A Deeper Love

One Sunday at Mass, a prayer card was handed out for husbands and wives to recite together. We stood up with the other couples and said the following prayer for our marriage:

Lord, help us to remember when we first met
and the strong love that grew between us.

To work that love into practical things so that
nothing can divide us.

We ask for words both kind and loving

And hearts always ready to ask for forgiveness
as well as to forgive.

Dear Lord, we put our marriage into your hands.

Amen.6

It is a wonderful thing to have couples pray for their marriage. And how good it is for couples to put their marriage in God’s hands and pray for kind words and forgiving hearts. But it was the opening line that struck us as strange: “Help us to remember when we first met and the strong love that grew between us.”

Sure, it is fine to fondly look back on those early years when we were falling in love. But we don’t want to dwell there. That’s looking backwards. That’s in the past. God wants to meet us in the marriage we have in the present—in all the joys, difficulties, trials, and messiness of our marriage and family life as it really is right now.

There is a temptation to hold up that initial love and those early years of dating, marriage, and family life as the ideal, as the standard for the love we should have now. But when we do that, we’re likely to be a bit disappointed with our marriage. Many husbands and wives have fallen into this trap and wondered to themselves, “Why don’t we have those same feelings all the time like we used to? … Why are things so challenging now? … Maybe something is wrong in our marriage.” Wives might ask, “Why doesn’t he care for me like he did back then? I used to know I was his priority, but now everything else seems so important to him!” Husbands might be frustrated: “She used to admire me and all I do … Now all I hear about is all the things I do wrong.” When the feelings of their first love have faded, some spouses might even panic and begin imagining they’d be much happier with someone else: “I just don’t feel close to my spouse anymore … I don’t feel loved, cared for, understood, or appreciated … I bet other people wouldn’t treat me this way …”

Beth: The love we had when we first met—those romantic feelings, the desire to be together all the time, the joy of gazing into each other’s eyes—I call that gooey love. It was real. And God used it to draw us together initially. But he doesn’t want us to stay there. We can’t stay there. It’s not enough. God wants to take us deeper. He wants to build a deeper love, a stronger bond.

I think about the beautiful elderly couple who have been married fifty to sixty years and have forged a wonderful spousal relationship over the decades. That is what I want. Their love has been tried, tested, and forged through many years of sacrifices, trials, and commitment. They don’t need gooey love. They can just sit side by side quietly together and know what the other is thinking. Peaceful. They each know the other is there. They know they’re with their best friend. That is the kind of love I want to grow into more and more each day.

Feelings

Edward: I will never forget when my friend called me to tell me he was getting married. He was the guy who said he never wanted to get married—he enjoyed his single life too much. So, when he announced his engagement to me, I was shocked. Out of all my friends, he was the last person I ever expected to want to settle down and tie the knot. I congratulated him and asked him about his fiancée—how they met, what she did, what he liked about her. As we were catching up, I asked him a very basic question:

“So, tell me more about your fiancée: why do you want to marry her?”

“Oh, she’s so much fun … We get along well … better than I have gotten along with anyone else before … I just really love being with her all the time.”

“That’s great! But tell me more about her … what is it about her that makes you think she’s the one?”

“Well, I guess we like all the same things … We like to go dancing together … We listen to the same music … We go biking together … We go to concerts together … We really have a lot of fun hanging out together.”

I was starting to get a little worried. I wasn’t married myself at the time, but I knew a marriage needed to be built on much more than shared interests and fun times together. So, I asked, “But is there anything else? Why do you think she’s the person you want to marry?”

“Well … I’m not sure how to answer that … I just know that every time I’m with her, I get a really, really good feeling inside.”

Now I wasn’t having a good feeling inside about what he was telling me. I was worried for my friend and the prospects of his marriage. I tried to share with him how marriage needs to be built on a lot more than good feelings … that feelings come and go in life … that the feelings will eventually fade and when that happens, what will be left of his relationship? He listened and assured me that he was going to be OK. He said he didn’t think this was going to be a problem for him and his fiancée.

The wedding day came and went. I was in graduate school at the time and not able to attend the ceremony on the other side of the country. But three months later, we happened to be in the same city for a kind of reunion of old friends. I was looking forward to seeing him and finally being able to meet his bride.

He showed up at the gathering very late and without his wife. He told everyone she was back at the hotel not feeling well and that he would only be able to stay for a few minutes. He was his usual, outgoing, funny, life-of-the-party self—it was just like old times. After he had stayed for about twenty-five minutes, I walked him out to his car just to catch a few moments one-on-one with my old friend.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t get to meet your wife tonight!”

His mood suddenly changed. “No, you’re not,” he replied with a stern face.

I was stunned. It was then I knew something was seriously wrong. He looked angry, sad, bitter, and helpless all at once. I asked him, “What happened? Is everything OK?”

“I’ve been married for just three months, and I already hate it. This is the hardest thing ever in my life. We fight all the time … It’s so hard … I hate it.” Only a few months into his marriage, my friend was having intense struggles—struggles that likely could have been avoided if the relationship had been based on much more than feelings.

Intentionally Building Something More

Most of us won’t find ourselves in a situation this desperate. Most of us know that marriage has to be built on much more than feelings. If asked on a quiz, “True or False: Love is more than feelings,” most would correctly answer “True.”

But it is one thing to know this fact in our heads. It is another thing to allow this important truth about love to shape our marriage. So, here is a second question: Though most Christians know love is more than feelings, is the average couple proactively striving to build something deeper to unite them as husband and wife? Is the average couple intentionally building a love that will help carry them through the trials that come when marriage and family life stretches them like never before? How about you?

All marriages eventually will hit a wall when the feelings fade and the husband and wife face difficult challenges in their relationship together. This can happen three months, three years, or thirteen years into a marriage. But at some point, their love will be tested like never before and be shown for what it really is. How much more is there to their love? How much have they really built together, beyond those initial feelings of attraction and romance?

The first step in preparing our marriages for this great journey of transformation is making sure we have a very clear understanding of the difference between the two kinds of love—which is what we’ll delve into next.

Reflection Questions

What am I doing to build my marriage on more than feelings? What more can I do on my end of the spousal relationship?

How much have I taken in our secular culture’s view of love as being about romantic feelings and sexual pleasure? Do I fill my mind more with images of secular love from Hollywood and social media or with images from Scripture and the saints? How might those images of love impact what I expect from my spouse in marriage?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: Recall a time when you continued loving your fiancé(e) even when you were experiencing negative feelings toward him or her. Recall another time when you recoiled and withdrew from your fiancé(e) when you were frustrated or hurt by him or her. Share with your fiancé(e) about those two incidents and discuss together how to navigate such situations when they happen in the future.

3

Two Kinds of Love

What is love?

We know that is a very basic question. But if we don’t get the most basic things in life correct, even if we are just slightly off, it can cause big problems.

Take, for example, the number pi. This important mathematical constant is approximately equal to 3.14159. It’s used in calculations to build skyscrapers, rockets, dams, suspension bridges, industrial factories, and concrete roads. Indeed, getting the number pi right is crucial for all kinds of engineering projects.

But imagine if an engineer came to your town to design a bridge, and he decided to round the number pi down to 3.0 to keep his calculations simple. That’s not that big of a deal, is it? After all, the number 3.0 is still close to 3.14. He may only be slightly off, but would you want to drive over a bridge built with that assumption?

We can ask a similar question about love and marriage. We might have a general sense of what love is, or we may grasp certain aspects of authentic love. But if we don’t constantly remind ourselves of what love really is—the specific kind of love Jesus calls us to in marriage—we’re going to have a lot of problems in our spousal relationship. Even the best of Christian couples with the best of intentions will face major challenges whenever they lose sight of what love really is. We want to be careful not to build our married lives on a vision of love that is even just slightly off.

We bring this up because there is a lot of confusion today about love. Even good, devout couples can approach their marriage with a skewed view of love that makes it much harder for them when difficulties come up. Most of us take in so much of the culture’s view of love—from the shows we watch, from the music we listen to, and from our own experiences of not having received authentic love in our upbringing. All this dramatically shapes what we think of love and impacts our marriages. It is crucial we get love right. And there are two visions for love that are constantly competing for our attention as Christians: the culture’s view of love and what Jesus teaches about love.

I Love Coffee

Just consider how loosely we use the word “love” today. We say things like, I love pizza. I love ice cream. I love the Chicago Cubs. I love b-a-c-o-n! We use the word “love” for so many things. If a husband says, “I love bacon … I love steak … I love the Cubs,” and then turns to his wife and says, “And I love you, too, honey,” what does he really mean?

When the modern world uses the word “love,” it usually means something like “you do something for me.”

Both of us are big fans of coffee. We “love” coffee. We love the smell of coffee. We love the taste of coffee. We love the sound of coffee percolating in the morning. We love holding a warm mug of coffee on a cold day. We love coffee. It does something for us. We love how it wakes us up in the morning and gets us ready to start our day. We love how it picks us up when we’re a little tired in the afternoon. We love coffee!

Similarly, we both “love” steak. A good juicy steak on a date night … medium rare, seasoned well, some sautéed mushrooms or onions on top. We love steak. It does something for us. It fills us up. It satisfies our cravings. It satisfies our taste buds. We love a good steak!

But here’s the challenge with this kind of love: I might love coffee and I might love a good steak, but once I’m done with the cup of coffee and I’ve finished my plate of steak, the love affair is over and I move on to the next thing that’s going to do something for me.

So, when people in the culture say “I love you,” they deep down often mean “you do something for me.” And that’s how so many people ultimately treat love: it’s about the feelings someone gives you. You give me a rush of emotions. You give me romantic feelings. I get a warm feeling in my heart whenever I’m with you. You do something for me. The average love song reinforces this sentimental view of love. Think of how so many songs are so focused on the feelings we get from another person: “You make me feeeeel soooo goooood!” “All I need is you!” “I can’t live without you!” This is “you do something for me” love.

But this secular view of love doesn’t have to be all about romantic emotions. “I love you” can mean “you make me feel not alone.” I was tired being single and lonely, and now you’re here. It’s great to have this companionship, to have someone to talk to, to share life with, to share dreams with … I’m so glad you’re here to help me not feel so alone anymore. You do something for me.

Or “I love you” can be about personal fulfillment: “You are here to make me happy.” You’re always here to support me and to fulfill my needs. I feel better about myself when I’m with you. I look to you to meet all my emotional needs. You do something for me.

Or “I love you” can mean you give me sexual pleasure. My sensual desires are fulfilled in you. I like looking at you, touching you. I can find sexual release in you. You do something for me. It’s Ed Sheeran’s view of love expressed in his hit song “Shape of You.”

He comes right out and so crassly says it: It is really not about you, as a person. It is just about the shape of you—your body. It’s your body I’m in love with. Your body satisfies my sensual desire. It gives me pleasure to look at, to think about, to touch, and to have sexual activity with. I enjoy your body. Your body does something for me.

Notice how self-centered all this is. In each of these scenarios, someone saying “I love you” does not mean he or she is really committed to you. “I love you” ultimately means your beloved is committed to what he or she gets out of you—romantic feelings, companionship, fulfilling his or her emotional needs, or sexual pleasure. You do something for your beloved. Your beloved enjoys what they get out of you.

But what happens when the feelings start to fade, the fun times are not always there, and things get hard? What happens when your beloved has to work on the relationship, make sacrifices, admit they are doing something wrong, make many changes in how they live and how they relate to you? What happens when your beloved no longer gets warm feelings from you, but experiences feelings of anger, hurt, frustration, and disappointment—will your beloved still be there for you? Is your beloved able to suffer well? If love is primarily a “you do something for me” love, it will never carry us through the realities of everyday married life. When things get dull or challenging and, as the old song goes, “you’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’,” then you will be discouraged and disillusioned about the marriage you’ve found yourself in and be tempted to imagine a better life somewhere else.

Real Love

Now don’t get us wrong. Romantic feelings, companionship, sexual attraction—none of these are bad. They can and should be a part of married love. The ideal marriage is not one in which a husband stoically says to his wife, “I love you. I’m committed to you. I will never leave you. I’d die for you … But I have absolutely no feelings for you.” Feelings are not bad. They bring us into the emotional sphere of the other person. They can enrich the bond between husband and wife. But they are not the essence of love itself. And if we do not intentionally pursue a deeper love, a focus on feelings can destroy a marriage.

Why? Because real love is not so self-centered: you do something for me. Real love is not inward looking. It’s not about what feelings you give me or how you fulfill my emotional needs or what you do for me or how efficient you are as my helpmate checking off items on my to-do list. Real love is outward looking. It is about looking outward to your beloved and being committed to your spouse for who he or she really is, with all the good qualities you enjoy but also with the many imperfections, weaknesses, and even sins that frustrate you. Real love is about seeking what is best for your beloved, not focusing on what you get out of the other person.

A Countercultural Definition of Love

So now, we are going to give you the real definition of love. It is not our own. It is taken from the great St. Thomas Aquinas and is quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. If you don’t learn anything else from this book, but you take in this Catholic definition of love—if you take it into your heart and into every interaction with your beloved—then we will know this book is a success. Here is the Catholic definition of love:

To love is to will the good of the other.

That’s it! It is so basic. But it is so countercultural. Unlike what we often see in Hollywood, social media, and the way most people approach romantic relationships today, authentic love, at its essence, ultimately has nothing to do with how I feel or what I get out of the other person. Love is outward looking, focused on the other person and a commitment to seek his or her good. Indeed, this is the love that Jesus modeled for us on the Cross. The God who is love became man in Jesus Christ to show us what love really is. So, if we want to grow in love in our marriages, we should always have our eye on Love himself, Jesus Christ, especially when he most fully revealed his love for us on the Cross.

Think about the model he gave us on Good Friday. While dying on Calvary, Jesus didn’t look out at the people and say, “You make me feel so good!” No. Real love is demanding. It can hurt sometimes. It can involve pain, courage, sacrifice, humility, patience, forgiveness, self-denial, and a willingness to suffer for our beloved … like Jesus did for us. Even devout Catholic couples need to be reminded of this foundational truth.

Catholic Sentimental Love

It’s encouraging to see so many young, faithful Catholics seeking to live the authentic Christian view of love. They look out into the culture and see the world’s vision for sex, dating, and marriage is simply not working. Many of them have found hope in the Catholic Faith, especially the teachings of St. John Paul II known as the Theology of the Body—the series of addresses he gave on love, sex, and marriage that offers a much-needed alternative to the self-centered and overly sexualized view of love in the mainstream of our culture.

Inspired by this Christian vision, many of them are wonderfully striving to live their romantic relationships differently. They want to build healthy dating relationships, strong marriages, and a spousal relationship truly centered on Jesus Christ.

But having worked closely with this younger generation in campus and young adult ministry for many years, we also see that many of them still have been influenced by the culture’s view of love. Lurking behind their virtuous commitment to chastity (“We will not have sex until we’re married”), their sincere pious talk (“My main priority is to help my spouse get to heaven”), and their genuine Catholic devotion (“We are going to pray together as a couple”), is often still a highly emotional, romanticized view of love.

It starts when they’re dating. “We’re going to do it the Catholic way,” they tell themselves. “We’re going to discern the relationship.” “Jesus will be the center of it all.” Some might even say, “We don’t do dating. We do courtship.”

When thinking about their wedding day, they plan a spectacular Catholic wedding, with beautiful sacred music, multiple priests, incense, candles—so very Catholic. And when they envision their future married life together, they have high hopes for a close, intimate, Christ-centered romantic relationship. They will pray together, have babies together, and help each other get to heaven. And their romance will be centered on Christ. They might even think to themselves, “It’s going to be so special. Each night, after we put the kids down to bed, we will sit by a fire together … we will hold hands … we will sip some good red wine … we will gaze into each other’s eyes … and we will whisper sweet quotes from the Theology of the Body to each other …”

We don’t know about you, but that’s not what our marriage looks like! Here’s what love looks like in the Sri household.

Edward: I come home after a long day at work, and there’s a mess on the table while Beth is cooking dinner in the kitchen. I rally the kids to clear things off and set the table. When we finally corral all the children, get them seated, and say our “Bless us, O Lord …” prayer, we begin the process of serving eight hungry little people.

One child right away needs more to drink. We get up to fill her cup. Another child then asks for something to drink, too. We think to ourselves, “It would have been helpful if you told us that when we were already up,” but we fill the cup anyway and sit back down. We’re finally about to take our first bite of food when someone asks, “May I have seconds?” We haven’t had firsts yet, but that’s OK. We dish out the second serving.

And then it happens. Inevitably, at least once or twice a week, the routine minidisaster takes place: Somebody spills a cup! We don’t know what’s so hard about this, but for some reason, keeping a cup from tipping over during dinner is a very difficult skill to learn! Now there’s a big puddle on the table spreading in all directions, people quickly lifting up their plates and pushing themselves away from the table so their pants don’t get soaked.

Now, what do the little children do when they spill their cup and see their drink pouring down to the floor? Do they cry? No. They don’t cry. They do something far worse.

They just stare.

We have Niagara Falls pouring down over the dining room floor, but the child just … stares.

“Get a towel! Someone help clean up this mess!”

We finally finish our family dinner, do a quick closing prayer and then … it’s game on! Now is the time we as parents have to be focused and bring the best of our game. The clock is winding down, we’re behind by many points on our to-do list, and there’s a lot for everyone to accomplish before bedtime. “Let’s all help clear the table! Get your chores done before you go upstairs. Remember to practice the piano. Get your homework done. Could someone please give the baby a bath? Don’t forget to pack your lunch for tomorrow. Do you need me to sign something for your teacher? Yes, honey, I can help you with your math. Hey, the baby is running around naked … could somebody please put clothes on her?”

As the evening winds down, we approach the most critical moment: the process of getting people to their beds. “Now everyone, get your pajamas on … and don’t forget to brush your teeth. Let’s get ready for bed now. Come for blessings and let’s do our prayer together before we go to sleep.”

We do our prayers. We give them their blessings. We’re almost to the finish line! “OK, children, it’s been a long day, and Mom and Dad are exhausted. It’s time to go to bed. We love you! Good night! Now go on up and please, stay … in … your … beds!”

A few minutes later, a small child wanders out of her room: “That means you, too, sweetie. Now go back to your room and remember to stay in your bed.”

The child scurries back. But just a few minutes later she escapes and is found sitting on the stairs.

“We said, stay … in … your … bed!”

The child runs back to her room immediately, but a couple minutes later somehow appears on the stairs again.

“STAY … IN … YOUR … BED!!!!!!!!”

It is 10:30 at night, and my wife and I finally make it back to the sanctuary of our bedroom. We plop down on our bed completely wiped out from the day. No time or energy for romantic conversation or a glass of wine by the fire. We are ready to fall right asleep. I only have it in me to turn to Beth to make sure she’s surviving.

“Are you OK, honey?” I ask, already half asleep.

Like a soldier just coming in from a fifteen-hour day of fighting on the battlefield, Beth manages to get a few words out: “Yes, I’m all right. Are you OK?”

“Yes,” I reply.

Maybe I can get in a few more words before my eyes close.

“I love you,” I whisper.

“I love you.”

“Good night.”

“Good night,” she replies.

And then we completely doze off.

That is love. That right there is what real love looks like in marriage. Marriage is not about two people staring into each other’s eyes and thinking, “You make me feel so good!” Real love is not so self-centered. Real love is more about husband and wife standing shoulder to shoulder and looking outward together—outward to serving something bigger than themselves. Serving their community, their parish, the poor … and if they are blessed with children, then it’s laying down their lives 24/7 to serve the children entrusted to them.

Of course, marriage certainly involves many moments of joy, closeness, and powerful feelings. And we do often enjoy a glass of wine together by a fire. But the Cross reminds us that the essence of real love is not about what we receive from others—what I get from my spouse or from my children. Authentic, lasting love is all about total self-giving—giving ourselves in service to our children and to each other. Jesus gave everything for us, holding nothing back and expecting nothing in return. Marriage and family life offers countless opportunities each day to love like Christ—to lay down our lives completely for others and to love without expecting anything back. For it is only when we give ourselves away in love that we find our true happiness.

Remember the definition of love: to love is to will the good of the other, to seek what is best for the other person, even if it means sacrifice. It is crucial we get this right. This is the pi of marriage.

We must keep this fundamental truth constantly in our mind. For the secular culture bombards us with a self-centered view of love—in the shows we watch, the music we listen to, the people we follow. And the Devil exploits this, constantly tempting us to focus on ourselves in marriage and count the cost: “He didn’t say thank you.” “She doesn’t understand.” “I deserve to be treated so much better than this.” “He forgot … again.” “Why doesn’t she respect me?” “Why don’t I have those feelings anymore?” “Taking care of these children is so demanding. It doesn’t make me come alive. I need something more life-giving for me.” These and other similar words we say in our heads are not from God. They come from the Devil, who is always trying to divide us and get us to “round down” love, to seek a “you do something for me” kind of love from our spouse. But God invites us to the only kind of love that will satisfy the deepest desires in our hearts: the total, self-giving love that Christ models for us on the Cross.

Reflection Questions

What are some ways you may have adopted the secular “you do something for me” view of love? Consider how this has impacted your marriage: what are some ways you expect your spouse to do something for you more than you expect yourself to do something for him/her?

Jesus on the Cross did not get a lot from the people he came to save. He didn’t get a lot of appreciation, honor, or praise. And he certainly didn’t have a lot of warm feelings. But he shows us what real love is all about. How does his love on Good Friday challenge or inspire you to love more like he loves in your marriage?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: One piece of advice we often give engaged couples is to commit to serving some organization together on a weekly basis—and then be faithful to that weekly commitment no matter what comes up, whether it be pressures at work, final exams, friends going out to watch a movie, your favorite team playing on TV, or a chance to go to a concert. A lot of people like to volunteer when it is fun, easy, and fits well into our schedule. But real marriage and family life is not about serving when it is convenient or interesting to me. It is about serving consistently day in and day out, even when I am tired, busy, overwhelmed—and even when I might rather be doing something else. Learning to serve something bigger than yourself and being consistent to that service helps develop the muscles of virtue you will need in much more demanding ways in marriage.

What is something you can commit to serving together on a consistent basis?

4

Back to the Garden: What We Really Long for in Marriage

The Bible says something strange about the very first marriage in the history of the world—something about the way Adam and Eve related together that, at first glance, sounds utterly bizarre.

After telling how Adam and Eve had “become one” in marriage, the Bible makes this very odd comment:

“And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25).

Naked … and not ashamed? Of all the things the Bible could tell us about that first marriage, why do we need to know this? Do we really need to hear about their lack of attire and how they felt about it?

Many Christians, when reading this perplexing Biblical verse, don’t even stop to ask the question: What does this mean? Why is it so important for us to know that they were naked and not ashamed? Most people read this strange verse and just continue on with the story, as if people walking around shamelessly naked in a garden were something normal.

But if we were to take those same words out of the Bible and bring them into our twenty-first-century life today, they would definitely arrest our attention. Imagine, for example, if someone messaged you, saying, “Hey, I’m naked … and I am not ashamed.” That would be weird! Definitely, too much information! But why is it that, when we read those same words in the Bible, we turn off our brains and simply say, “I have no idea what that means, but I’m sure it must be holy …”

Let’s not turn off our brains at this verse. Let’s take these words very seriously, for they come from God, and they offer an important window into what God wants to do in our hearts in marriage.

Naked and Not Ashamed

There was one famous Christian leader of the last century who dared to ask about the significance of this verse. St. John Paul II pondered the biblical meaning of shame. What does it mean that Adam and Eve “were not ashamed”? He explains that shame in this story involves fear of another person: I don’t know if I can trust the other person. I’m afraid of being misunderstood, of being let down, of being hurt, of being used. Ultimately, shame is a fear of being vulnerable. I don’t know if the other person is trustworthy, so I hold back. I build up a wall. I’m afraid to let this person see me as I really am.

So, when the Bible says Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed, it’s not just referring to their unclothed bodies. It’s saying a lot about the depths of their spousal relationship. Their physical nakedness points to an even deeper emotional or spiritual nakedness. They don’t just unveil their bodies to each other; they can bare their very souls to each other. They have such a profound confidence, trust, and security in the relationship, they can allow themselves to be seen by the other person as they really are.

But how can this be? How can they have such a perfect, trusting relationship? Unlike us, they are living before the Fall, so there is no original sin impacting their relationship. This husband and wife do not have any selfishness in their hearts. They are always thinking about their beloved and what is best for the other person. They are never impatient or unkind with each other. They are always honoring, grateful for, and serving each other. They never forget to say thank you. They are living in mutual perfect, self-giving love.

Think about what that would do for your spousal relationship: if your beloved treated you with such honor, care, and attention, it would create an environment of total trust. You would feel safe to give your heart—your whole heart, everything about you—to your beloved, holding nothing back.

In Awe over the Gift

Most of all—and here is the crucial point St. John Paul II makes about this verse—Adam marveled over the beautiful gift Eve made of herself, entrusting herself to him within marriage. (And Eve was in awe over the gift Adam made of himself to her). Looking at this from Adam’s perspective, think about how profound this would be for him. He knows that this beautiful daughter of God has free will, the freedom to do anything she wants with her life. And he knows that she freely chose to give up that freedom, to commit herself to him and what’s best for their marriage. Picture Adam, knowing all this and saying to himself in awe, “This beautiful daughter of God, who is made in the image and likeness of God, who can choose to do whatever she wants with her life—this woman chose to commit herself to me? She chose to give up her freedom to do whatever she wants and dedicate her life as a gift to me, to what is best for me and for our relationship? I’m not worthy of such an amazing gift!”

It is as if Eve is placing her entire life—her very heart—into the hands of her beloved. In awe over the mystery of her total self-giving love, Adam has a profound sense of responsibility to care for her as a priceless gift. He would want to be so careful—with every look, with every word, with every action—to honor her for the gift she is to him and not to do anything that might hurt her or let her down.

Holding Your Spouse’s Heart

Now let’s get practical. How do all these details from the book of Genesis relate to my marriage relationship today?

Imagine if I collected fine art and I place a million-dollar crystal sculpture in your hands and ask you to hold it for me for the next hour while I run an errand. I tell you to be very careful with it, explaining that if the sculpture gets the slightest blemish, the least bit of damage, it will lose all its value. How would you feel holding that crystal sculpture? Probably a little nervous. You’d likely be holding it very carefully, perhaps using both hands to protect it and not moving around too much, so as not to risk doing anything that might cause it the slightest harm. You realize the tremendous value of the sculpture, and you treat it with the gentleness, care, and attention it deserves.

This is how Adam treated his wife, Eve. St. John Paul II says Adam saw her the way God saw her—not just as someone with physical beauty, or as a companion and helpmate to share life with, or as someone who gave him good feelings. He saw her as a beautiful daughter of God, made in the image and likeness of God, who entrusted her heart and committed her entire life to Adam. In awe over the mystery of Eve giving herself to him in this unique way, Adam responded with a tremendous sense of responsibility to care for Eve as a priceless gift. In other words, Adam saw in her something much more valuable than a million-dollar crystal sculpture. It was as if he were holding his wife’s heart in his hands—so careful with every word, every interaction, every thought, every tone of voice—wanting to honor her, serve her, care for her, not wanting to do anything that could possibly hurt her.

Imagine having a spouse like that! This kind of love—a love that truly receives you as a gift of tremendous value—is itself a gift to you. It creates an environment of total security and trust. It provides a setting in which you feel safe to be vulnerable, to allow your beloved to see you as you really are, to share what is weighing most deeply on your heart, your greatest hopes and dreams, fears and concerns. It creates an environment in which you feel free to give yourself fully to your beloved as a gift, holding nothing back.

Edward: I know that when Beth and I are in sync, really in tune with each other’s hearts, there is nothing else in the world I would rather be doing than being with her. When she takes an interest in what I am doing, when she is supporting me through a trial, when she encourages me, appreciates me, or is excited about what I’m excited about, it makes me want to share even more of my heart with her. I sense she sees the depths of me, not just what I do for her, the family, or others. She sees the real me—with all my strengths and weaknesses and all that’s going on inside—and she loves me and holds me carefully as an invaluable gift. And that is a gift to me: for it makes me want to share more of my hopes, desires, dreams, sorrows, fears, concerns with her.

Beth: For me, it’s when I get my husband’s undivided attention, when I know he is fully present to me, that I share what is deepest on my heart. My husband is a “machine.” He gets so much done, juggles many things, has many responsibilities for our family and for the Church. And it’s one of the things I love about him. But it’s when we have regular leisurely time together amid our busy family and I feel like there’s space—that it’s safe to share, that he’s in a state to receive what I have to share—it is then that I feel closest to him. I feel like I am not just one of the many valuable sculptures he has in his collection but the most important one, the most treasured one—the one he’s holding so tenderly right now in his hand. That’s when I reveal my heart to him the most—when I share something I’m hoping for, when I discuss a deeper need I have or something that’s been weighing on me.

Broken Glass

Now let’s turn back to the glass sculpture analogy. Imagine you have your own million-dollar crystal sculpture. Let’s say it is a world-class piece of art, handed on for centuries from one generation to the next in your family. If you had to leave your crystal sculpture for an extended period of time with someone, choosing the right person would be important. You wouldn’t entrust it to just anyone. If you had a friend you knew to be trustworthy, careful, and very responsible with all that is under his care, you might be willing to let that person look after your million-dollar crystal sculpture. But if you had a friend who was notorious for breaking things, losing belongings, and not taking good care of anything, would you want to leave your valuable family heirloom with him? Probably not. You’d be afraid he wouldn’t take good care of it; he’d be forgetful. He might break it just like he breaks everything else.

Have you ever felt that way in your marriage? Have you ever felt afraid to put your whole heart in your spouse’s hands—not sure you can trust that your beloved will care for your heart as a priceless gift?

Edward: This reminds me of a time when Beth wanted to share something with me that had been deep on her heart … and I totally crushed her spirit, making her not want to share with me again. She had been feeling the nudge to do more writing, maybe for a blog, a book, or other projects. At the time, we only had one desktop computer at home for her and the children to share. She simply desired to have her own laptop that she could use at home or take to the coffee shop or library, one that she could use for her own writing and other projects, just like the laptop I had from my job. She had been thinking about this for a while but had been nervous to bring it up, knowing it was a big-ticket item.

Finally, she mustered up the courage to share her idea with me while giving me a haircut.

“Hey so, I’ve been thinking I’d like to do some more writing …”

“Oh, like what?” I asked.

“You know, things for wives and moms, maybe even something on Jane Austen, applying it to modern life … things like that.”

“OK, sure, that’d be great!”

“But you see,” she continued, “I can’t do that so well here at home. There’s only the one desktop in the middle of the living room. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate there with all the noise, and the kids need that computer often for school. Do you think I could get a laptop just for me?”

Next came my crucial mistake. We had recently made some major expenditures for an addition to the house and did not have a lot left in savings. So, instead of affirming her desire to do more writing, I immediately went into financial analysis mode. Unfortunately, I didn’t treat her as my beloved who was sharing something deep on her heart. I treated her like someone at the office proposing an expensive initiative without a business plan. My reply sounded like I expected her to demonstrate “proof of concept” before a laptop could be purchased. I said, “Why don’t you write a few chapters first and then we’ll see?”

Beth: Ouch! Those words hit me like a dagger to the heart. My mind started racing: Does he think that I can’t write? That I am not worth investing in? That this is just some spur-of-the-moment idea? That I am not good enough? Or incapable? Or too distracted to pull anything off? I knew a laptop was not a meager purchase; I knew it was a big ask for such a pricey item, especially coming off the recent house addition. But I did not feel valued at all, and it stung to hear those words.

Most of all, the experience made me pull back—not just that evening but for the next several days. It was not as if we got into a big argument that night. But I was deeply hurt. We continued talking, but something inside me changed. I began to withdraw and went back into a walled-up space in my heart for self-protection and wanted to stay there. And the ripple effect lasted many weeks. I didn’t want to share what was really going on inside me anymore. I didn’t let myself get excited about anything with him. And I definitely didn’t want to bring up anything that might be a sensitive subject. I didn’t feel safe to share what was on my heart. Eventually, I let him know how I was hurt. He apologized, we reconciled … and we did eventually purchase the laptop (in fact, the one I am writing with now!). But these are the kinds of little hurts that often come up in married life. Whenever we experience a critical word, a hurtful action, a lack of attention, a lack of interest, or as in this case, a spouse crushing a hope we have on our heart, it makes us want to hold back and build a wall.

This can happen in many ways throughout a marriage: Sometimes we sense that our spouse might not take care of our heart—that our spouse is too busy and distracted and is not able to be present to us in the way we need him or her to be; that our spouse will not understand, will jump to conclusions, will make us feel bad or second-guess us; that our spouse might let us down, drop the ball, not think things through; that our spouse might hurt us with unkind words or tone of voice; that our spouse might be too caught up in his or her own world, work, or screens and not care for us the way we need to be cared for. When we experience that kind of fear, we hold back our hearts, we withdraw our love, we instinctively protect ourselves from getting hurt. We don’t want to entrust our hearts fully to someone who will not do a good job taking care of our heart as a gift.

This is what happens in that first marriage in Eden. Once sin enters Adam’s heart, he realizes that he is capable of selfish acts. Because of the Fall, he suddenly senses something within him he never experienced before—self-centered interests, a desire to put his own comfort, pleasure, or benefit before his wife’s. He realizes he is capable of saying something that hurts her or doing something that hurts her.

And as soon as he realizes this, it dawns on him that she could do something to hurt him. So, what does Adam do? He pulls back. He withdraws his total love. He is afraid of being hurt, of being let down. Fear and insecurity enter his heart, and he starts to put up walls to protect himself. That’s why the Bible says that after the Fall, Adam and Eve are naked and ashamed. The walls of shame have entered their relationship for the first time and divided them. The original unity they shared—the unity we most deeply long for in marriage—is lost. A thousand dysfunctional defense mechanisms now take its place and prevent them from experiencing the unity they desire.

This is what happens in our marriages. Loneliness. Fear. Walls. Shame. Disappointment. Hurt. Resentment. All of our marriages are tainted by the original sin we bring to our spousal relationship. Though we may never be able to go back to the Garden of Eden and experience our marriages as a perfect paradise—we will always have struggles—Christ has redeemed us, and the grace of the sacrament can help us overcome our weaknesses and build a greater union. We must educate our love, train it, and learn how to love as God loves. That’s what the remaining chapters of this book will explore: practical ways to bring down the walls that divide our marriages and build a deeper unity and trust. Through intentional effort on our end and Christ’s grace working in us, we can take steps toward restoring the original unity God had in store for us in marriage.

But first, we must address one big challenge each couple faces: learning how not to allow walls to be built around our heart when we are hurt by our spouse. All of us are going to be let down and hurt by our spouse. How well we train ourselves to respond when that happens can make or break a marriage.

Reflection Questions

Think of a time when you felt very close to your spouse—when you sensed you could be vulnerable and put your heart in his or her hands. Why did you have that profound trust and closeness? What was happening in your relationship at that time that created such an environment of trust? What can you do to live more like that again in your marriage?

Prayerfully consider if there is something you sometimes say or do that makes your spouse pull back and build a wall around his or her heart? Humbly ask God to show you. Then ask him for the grace to avoid doing that in the future. And consider telling your spouse you are aware of how your actions have hurt him or her and ask forgiveness.

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: Consider your friendships. How often do you have vulnerable, difficult conversations with your friends to work through conflict, misunderstandings, and hurts? Do you consistently address difficult topics with friends, colleagues, and family members? Or is it your tendency to avoid conflict and pull back from relationships when there is tension or hurt feelings? If so, spend some time praying about where that tendency comes from. Was there a situation from your childhood or a previous relationship that taught you to avoid conflict or suppress your feelings? Consider sharing with your fiancé(e) about that experience and how it affects you.

5

Living in Separate Bedrooms … of the Heart

“I divorce you in my heart.”

We have never heard a couple say those exact words. But we have heard many people express this idea, admitting that they have closed off their heart from their spouse. They have given up hope for their marriage, built up a self-protective wall, and resigned themselves simply to coexist with the one they married.

These are not spouses who move out and file for legal separation. They still live together, sleep together, raise the kids together, plan the week together, and go to Mass together. Their marriages might not be filled with a lot of yelling, anger, or tension. They might give all the outward appearances of having a decent marriage. But on the inside of their spousal relationship, there is no real closeness. They are far from the joyful friendship they envisioned sharing together when they first got married. They have slowly drifted apart from each other in their hearts. Over time, they have built up those impenetrable walls around their heart, not wanting to get hurt, not wanting to be disappointed, giving up trying and giving up on their marriage. They stay together because it is the good Catholic thing to do, but they just don’t enjoy each other anymore. They live parallel lives.

Not all marriages get this bad. Many spouses don’t go so far as to separate from their beloved in their hearts. But many devout Christian couples have admitted being very tempted to do so. They have reached points where they felt so hurt, so disillusioned, so helpless, that they have experienced the temptation to close off their heart from the one they married.

How does a marriage reach this low point? Maintaining and deepening our unity—our being truly one, our living heart-to-heart—takes a lot of effort. If not careful, even the best of Christian couples can easily allow walls of division to start rising in their marriage.

Be My Everything

Marriages usually don’t begin this way. Most engaged couples are overjoyed that they have finally found “the one.” The one who will always be there for them. The one who will fulfill their heart’s deepest desires. The one who will help them not feel alone anymore. The one who will make them feel special, valued, cared for. The one who will fulfill all their needs and help them feel good about themselves.

But when the realities of married life settle in, they are bewildered. Eventually, they will run up against their spouse’s weaknesses and shockingly realize their spouse can’t fulfill all their needs. Only Jesus can. So, when their spouse consistently misunderstands, miscommunicates, lets them down, or hurts them, they gradually become frustrated and disillusioned with their marriage. And that is when four walls, each higher than the last, begin to be built up in their relationship.

1. Avoiding Topics

At first, you start noticing that you are tiptoeing around the problems in your relationship. Maybe you didn’t intentionally plan to take this approach. It just started happening: You avoid certain topics. You don’t ask certain questions. While it is OK sometimes to step back and process certain issues or work things out internally yourself first, it is a sign of a problem when you start to notice a pattern: you regularly don’t bring up concerns you have about the relationship or ways you would like to be treated differently. When you have done that before, you’ve only been disappointed. Your beloved didn’t really listen. They didn’t understand. Or they got mad and defensive. It only caused more stress and problems, so you subconsciously learned to protect yourself. You taught yourself never to go there again: don’t bring up those topics, don’t bring up those concerns, don’t bring up those hurts. A wall has been raised that starts to divide you and your spouse.

2. Not Sharing What Is on Your Heart

If this does not get addressed, you are, over time, likely to reach a second level of wall building. You teach yourself not to volunteer too much information about what you’re thinking, what you’re hoping for, what you’re feeling. This isn’t just about avoiding certain topics. You start to stay on the surface about everything with your spouse. Your conversations don’t go much deeper than talking about the kids, what’s in the news, situations at work, schedules for the week, who will pick up a certain child from practice, grocery lists, and reminders to take out the trash. It’s all cordial, but not too deep.

If you share too much, you fear you will only be disappointed. He won’t understand. She will not really care. He won’t like that idea. She will just tell me about all that I’m doing wrong. You’re too afraid to risk ever sharing what is really on your heart. It’s better to play it safe. Don’t share any of your hopes—your desires for your life, for your kids, and certainly not for your marriage. Don’t share what bothers you, what hurts you, what disappoints you. Don’t share what you need, what you long for, what you wish could be better in your relationship. Instead of fighting for a deeper unity with your spouse—instead of saying, “I want you to know how I feel because I want to protect our unity … I want to share what is going on and what makes me hold back because I don’t want our marriage to fall into further division”—instead of addressing the problems in your marriage, your motto becomes “conceal, don’t reveal.” It is safer to have unfulfilled hopes and desires than to share them only to be disappointed by your spouse’s response. An even higher wall goes up, furthering the divide between you and the one you married.

3. Finding Your Purpose Somewhere Else

In the end, we cannot live like this. We long for friendship. We long to be known and understood. We need to have a purpose in life. So, if we are not experiencing that in our marriage, we will seek some other way to find fulfillment in life, some other outlet for the love, meaning, and purpose we long for. And we find ourselves in a third phase of wall building: turning to other things that we think are safer and more life-giving. A mom might focus all her attention on the children. Her husband is too difficult to deal with, but at least she can find her purpose in serving the kids. She might also focus on her friends, her women’s Bible study group, volunteering at the parish, her career, or connecting with others on social media.

Similarly, when things are hard at home, many husbands focus all their attention on work. They go to the office early and stay late. They keep themselves busy when they’re home, too, doing things for work late into the night or on the weekend. They have confidence in the workplace but feel like failures at home. They get affirmation for their accomplishments at the office but seemingly only get complaints and disappointment from their wives. Some men even will turn to pornography or the attention of other women when they are not connecting well with their wives.

One measure of how well a couple is doing together is to ask whether in the evening they spend more time with screens or with each other. When we’re spending more time in a virtual world and connecting with others on social media than we are spending connecting with our spouse in real conversation, it’s a sign of a marriage heading in the wrong direction.

4. Losing Hope for Your Marriage

If a husband and wife don’t address these growing walls, they might eventually settle into a melancholic despair. You might tell yourself, “This dynamic will never get better. He will never really listen. She will never really understand. Things will never really change. I guess I just have to accept this.” So, you don’t even bother trying anymore. You don’t let yourself imagine a better life together. You might even spiritualize your marital problems: “I guess this is just my cross. I will never have a happy marriage. My spouse is always going to be like this. I will have to bear this.”

But all this pious talk in our heads about bearing the cross of a disappointing marriage might not be as spiritual as it seems. It might just be a mask, covering up a certain selfishness in our soul. In other words, it might be an excuse to justify our own behavior that has contributed to this difficult marriage. It might be a narrative we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to try harder, face our problems, and consider how God might be asking us to change. We are tempted to give up and seek fulfillment in other endeavors that distract us from the pain in our marriage rather than pour our entire lives into fixing the human relationship that matters most: our vocation of marriage.

In the end, however, God is going to judge us most on how well we played our part in our marriages. On Judgment Day, when we are before the throne of God, will we be able to say we have given our very best to our marriages? Our marriages aren’t going to be perfect. And they might be very broken and dysfunctional. Marriage is a partnership between husband and wife, and no one individual has control over their spouse’s contribution to the relationship. But even if our marriage does go through difficult times, will we be able to tell the Lord that we at least did everything we could on our end to heal our marriage? Did we give our very best? Did we make our marriage the top priority in life? Were we willing to make sacrifices and change our habits and patterns of relating to our spouse and go out of our way to understand things from our spouse’s perspective and not our own? On the Last Day, when God looks upon how well we played our part in our vocation—which is the one area of marriage we do have control over—let us pray it is our generosity and unconditional, sacrificial love that shines, not our closed-mindedness or unwillingness to change and the walls we have built around our heart.

* * * * * * *

One of the most important keys to tearing down the walls in our marriages and preventing them from going up in the first place is a relationship principle St. John Paul II underscores for married love: total acceptance. Do you have total acceptance of your spouse, even with their faults, even when they hurt you? Do you remain committed to your beloved, or do you withdraw your love when you are hurt? This key of total acceptance is what we will address next.

Reflection Questions

What are areas in your spousal relationship where you have noticed yourself building a wall—avoiding certain topics, not wanting to share certain things, or seeking fulfillment more outside of your relationship than with your spouse? Whether that wall is small or big, what do you think God is wanting you to do to tear down that wall and work toward greater unity with your spouse?

Have you ever noticed your spouse withdraw and build a wall around his or her heart? Why do you think he or she has done that? What might you have done to contribute to that? What can you do to help your spouse feel closer, safer, more trusting to share his or her heart with you more?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: When we are falling in love, it might be hard to imagine our beloved not wanting to share his or her heart with us. But this is a common challenge in marriage, and we might even begin to notice it during engagement. Prayerfully consider if you ever notice your fiancé(e) withdraw or not feel safe or free to share something with you. Is there something you say or do that causes that? What can you do to change to give him or her greater trust and willingness to be vulnerable with you? On your end: Are there sensitive topics you’re afraid to discuss or situations that make you disengage? Why? What can you do to not allow that distance? What do you need from your fiancé(e) to help you feel freer to share more what’s really going on inside you?

6

Total Acceptance

Oh, no … I’m caught … what’s Beth going to do?

This is what I was thinking when I said something that hurt my wife one evening. We were in the kitchen unloading groceries. She was at the counter putting cans in the cabinet. As soon as I spoke the words, I knew I shouldn’t have said them that way. They had a certain tone and a certain edge, and I knew she’d be hurt if she understood what I was saying.

I wanted to take those words back, but there was nothing I could do. They were spoken and were floating out toward her. In an instant, they would reach her ears. And now, depending on whether she caught my nuance, I would have to face the consequences.

I knew she definitely picked up on what I meant when I saw a can that was about to be placed in the cabinet never make it to its home. She slowly guided the can back down to the counter. She then put both hands on that counter, looked down, and took a deep breath.

Oh, no … I’m dead, I thought.

It was at this moment Beth did the most unexpected thing. Even though she was clearly hurt, she looked at me with a hint of a smile and said, “You didn’t really mean that, did you?”

The way Beth responded to me in that moment drew out the best of me. She called me out on my unkind words, but not in a condemning, accusatory way. And that gave me the space to not be defensive, but to admit I was wrong, say sorry, set things right, and be reconciled with her. Her response that evening also exemplifies a key marriage principle from St. John Paul II that is particularly crucial in those times when our spouse hurts us: the principle of total acceptance.

Just the Way You Are?

We go into our marriages aware that our beloved has certain quirks and weaknesses. We notice she takes a long time to get ready. He doesn’t keep things tidy. She likes to talk a lot to her friends. He doesn’t think things through carefully. But, surely, we can live with those little idiosyncrasies. We basically go into marriage singing the line from that old Billy Joel song, “I love you just the way you are.”

But whether it’s seven months or seven years into our marriage, we’re probably not singing that song anymore. It’s more like, “Yes, I love you … but could you please stop leaving your things around the house?” It’s as if we wish we had a magical remote control that we could use on our spouse like we do with the TV. When a commercial comes on, we click on the remote control to change the channel. We see something we don’t like, we click again: change. We’re bored: change.

We can treat our spouse in a similar way. We don’t like how they spend the money: change. We don’t like how they parent one of the kids: change. We are annoyed by finding their things where they don’t belong … again: change. We don’t like how they handle stress: change. It’s as if we’ve added one little word to Billy Joel’s song: “I love you just the way you are, except …”

But marriage allows for no exceptions: We are called to love our spouse, with all their quirks, all their shortcomings, and all their wounds, weaknesses, and even sins. That doesn’t mean we approve of their faults. We might even need to challenge them to change certain kinds of behavior. But marriage calls us to an unconditional love and total acceptance of the person, as he or she is. For it is this particular person we married—as he or she really is, with his or her many inadequacies—not some ideal we have in our heads about what a perfect spouse should be.

When Our Spouse Hurts Us

Our love, however, is tested the most when our spouse hurts us. In those moments, we can be tempted to dwell on the hurt. We can complain about our spouse: “Why is she always like this?” We can start to keep score: “That’s the fifth time he forgot to say thank you today.” We can become defensive: “But she started it!” We can hold back in our relationship: “I’d better not bring up that topic ever again.”

Those condemning stories we tell ourselves about our spouse are usually not from God. Remember, it’s the Devil who wants to divide our marriage. And he’ll use the countless miscommunications, misunderstandings, missteps, and especially hurts that come up in our marriages to get us to dwell on our beloved’s faults and build a wall of resentment. It’s easy, after all, to love our spouse when he or she is fun, in a good mood, and makes us feel good. But the true colors of our marriage come out when we are hurt by our beloved. In those painful moments, will we still love our spouse, or will we withdraw our love?

And now we come to the key insight from St. John Paul II. He challenged spouses to love each other in this way: “Love the person complete with all his or her virtues and faults, and up to a point independently of those virtues and faults and in spite of those faults.”7 This, of course, does not mean that we turn a blind eye to our beloved’s behavior when they are having a not-so-beautiful moment. But we do not let their actions in that circumstance completely define them or divide our spousal relationship. As St. John Paul II explains,

The strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles, when his or her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults, and without in the least approving of them. For the person as such never loses its essential value. The emotion which attaches itself to the value of the person remains loyal to the human being.8

Edward: To fully appreciate what John Paul II is getting at, let’s go back to that evening in the kitchen when I spoke those unkind words to Beth. Think of all the different ways she could have responded to me. She could have yelled at me, “Why do you always say things like that!” She could have stormed out of the kitchen in anger. She could have thrown the can at me! Even worse, she could have given me the silent treatment and pretended as if I were not there for the rest of the night. But instead, Beth chose to pose her pointed question: “You didn’t really mean that, did you?”

Notice how she didn’t ignore what I had done. She didn’t look at me and say, “I just love it when you say hurtful things!” Nor did she shrug it off and pretend it wasn’t a big deal. It was a big deal. I hurt her, and I deserved to be called out on it. But she did it in the best way possible. She addressed the issue in a way that didn’t make me defensive. She didn’t ascribe motives or assume the worst of intentions: “He’s always so selfish and inconsiderate!” Rather, even though I had done something wrong, she didn’t judge my heart. And she did not withdraw her love. She knew I was probably already feeling badly about what I had said. Her firm—but noncondemning—challenge gave me the space to do the right thing, admit I was wrong and say sorry.

Six Basic Words

And that’s what I did. I said those three basic words that need to be spoken over and over again in marriage: “I am sorry.” And she responded with the other three words that need to be repeated just as often: “I forgive you.” How many times we need to speak these precious words to each other in the ongoing cycle of sin and forgiveness, selfishness and mercy, hurt and reconciliation that make up our married life! It takes a lot of humility to admit one is wrong and say, “I am sorry …” But it communicates “I love you” in a powerful way. When we say a heartfelt “I am sorry,” we are basically telling our spouse, “You are so valuable to me. I feel badly about what I did. I don’t want to hurt you in this way again.”

Similarly, it takes just as much humility and love to say, “I forgive you.” When we truly forgive, from the heart, it’s as if we’re saying to our spouse, “Yes, you did something wrong, and it hurt me. But I see your heart. I see a lot of good in your heart—that the deepest part of your heart does not resonate with what you did. It is sorry and wants to change. I don’t want to hold this over you. I want us to be reconciled. I forgive you.”

There are always going to be hurts in our marriage—moments when we’re selfish, impatient, unkind, unthoughtful; moments when we injure each other. That’s always going to be there. The key is to get to these six basic, healing words as quickly as possible: “I am sorry … I forgive you.” And that’s what happened that evening in our kitchen. Because Beth did not judge my heart and she gave me the space to own up to what I had done, we were able to get to these words quickly, be reconciled, move on, and actually enjoy the rest of our evening together! So many blowups in a marriage can be avoided if we are quick to de-escalate, to have total acceptance of our spouse even when they hurt us—not in the least approving of the wrong they did, but not judging their heart, so that we can give each other the space to say sorry.

The “Marriage Confessional”

That’s why, in our relationship, we have what we like to call the “marriage confessional.” In marriage, no one can love you like your spouse. But it’s also true that no one can hurt you like your spouse. So when something happens like this and we hurt each other, we try to make it a point to admit as quickly as possible the wrong we did—the part each person contributed to the tension or hurt, the part that each person could have done better (and usually it’s both of us!)—and say, “I am sorry.” It’s important to come out and actually say those three words, “I am sorry.”

Some couples, however, have a difficult time saying “sorry.” When we know we hurt our spouse but don’t explicitly express our contrite hearts, we prevent true reconciliation. We timidly tiptoe around our spouse for a while, wondering if all is OK. Or we try to be cheerful and upbeat, hoping to cover up the problem and pretend everything is back to normal. We hope our spouse maybe will get busy and distracted or hope the hurt will somehow magically go away on its own. But that’s not how marriage works. These little wounds can fester when we don’t apply the healing power of a sincere apology. A deep-seated anger and resentment begins to grow. And it will lash out in other, more severe ways if we don’t address it.

Moreover, we’re inflicting a second injury on our spouse when we fail to quickly say, “I am sorry.” If we don’t say those words, our beloved is left painfully wondering, “Does he realize I was hurt? Does she understand what she did? Does he think it’s OK to treat me like this? Does she feel badly about what happened? Is he going to try to do things differently next time? Does she even care?” Let’s let our beloved know, as quickly as possible, that we realize we did something wrong, that we hurt them, and that we want to make things right.

Our stubbornness, however, often keeps us from getting to these three important words. After more than twenty years of marriage, we’re still learning to say sorry quickly—to listen and understand, to try to see things from the other person’s perspective, to consider how we might have hurt the other person, to consider what we could have done better, to not get defensive, to not get so caught up in the legalistic details (“But you said …” “You knew …” “I didn’t say that …” “You did this first …”). Sometimes we say words to our spouse that make us sound more like a prosecuting attorney than a best friend who is trying to bring understanding and reconciliation after an inadvertent misstep in the relationship. You can make your case and win an argument and still completely lose your spouse’s heart because you crushed it. That’s why we need the “marriage confessional”—we need to quickly tell our beloved sorry when we hurt them. We need to clear the air, admit our wrong, and trust in their mercy.

“They Know Not What They Do”

But we also need to forgive our beloved when they do say sorry. Sometimes, when we’ve been hurt we like to lord it over our beloved. “Cool … I’ve got him in ‘sorry-mode’ now … I’m going to milk this for all it’s worth!” That’s not helpful either. As Pope Francis explains, “Those who know that their spouse is always suspicious, judgmental and lacking unconditional love, will tend to keep secrets, conceal their failings and weaknesses, and pretend to be someone other than who they are.”9 We don’t want that for our spouse. So when our beloved humbly comes to us with a sincere apology, we should be quick to say “I forgive you” and be reconciled with our beloved.

This is the kind of love Jesus models for us on Good Friday. After he is nailed to the Cross, Jesus looks out at the people he came to save and sees them abandon him, mock him, and reject him. This causes Jesus more pain than the nails in his hands and feet. At this most sorrowful moment, our Savior looks up to heaven and says the most unexpected thing: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Jesus sees their horrific sin, which is the greatest sin of all humanity, the murder of the Son of God. But he also sees their hearts and realizes that even though the people are crucifying the Son of God, they don’t really know what they are doing. And so he lovingly asks the Father in heaven to forgive them.

This story of Good Friday is experienced in our marriages. How often we hurt each other in marriage without really realizing what we are doing! It’s not as if a husband wakes up on Monday morning and says to himself, “How can I make my wife absolutely miserable this week?” We hurt each other, but as Jesus said on Calvary, we know not what we do. Let us, therefore, take on the compassionate heart of Jesus in our marriages, not the heart of Satan the Accuser. It is the Devil who wants us to condemn and judge our spouse whenever their slightest imperfections frustrate us. Jesus, however, wants us to look at our spouse with compassion, to see more than our spouse’s faults and sins. He wants us to see their hearts, their good intentions, their honest mistakes, their sincere efforts. He wants us to look up to heaven like he did and say, “Father, forgive them … they know not what they do.”

Reflection Questions

How do you tend to respond when your spouse disappoints, frustrates, or hurts you? How much have you learned to have total acceptance of your spouse in those moments? What can you do better?

Do you tend to think more about the ways your spouse needs to change or the ways you need to change? How easy is it for you to see things from your spouse’s perspective, admit you were wrong, and say sorry? What can you do to help you focus on your own weaknesses, say sorry sooner, and do so with more love?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: Do you think God wants you to think more about the ways your fiancé(e) needs to change or the ways you need to change? Which do you tend to do more? When there is tension in the relationship, how well do you enter into your fiancé(e)’s experience and try to see things from his or her perspective? How easy is it to admit you were wrong for whatever you have done to contribute to the tension? How easy is it for you to take responsibility for your faults and truly say sorry? What can you do to focus on your own weaknesses and strive to be better? Improving in these areas during engagement will prepare you to work through the bigger tensions that will arise in marriage.

7

Healing: Your Upbringing Impacts You More Than You Think

Beth: This was finally going to be the year when I was going to be ahead of the game for the first day of school for our kids. Most Augusts, I was frantically rushing around at the last minute going from store to store to get all fifty-seven items on the various school supply lists for each of our six school-aged children. But this August was going to be different. I had planned ahead and ordered everything online back in July, put it in a couple of boxes in our garage, and had it ready to go. Stepping into the new school year was finally going to be easy, peaceful, and full of joy.

My hopes were dashed that morning when I went out to the garage and couldn’t find the boxes with everyone’s school supplies. I searched all over. I searched inside the house. I looked in the basement. I searched the shed in the backyard. I thought, “They’ve got to be somewhere!” I asked the kids, “Did anyone see the boxes of school supplies in the garage?” No one knew where the boxes were, and we were now already running late for the meet-and-greet appointments with the teachers for the new school year.

After several more minutes of everyone frantically looking all over the garage, I showed the children the very spot on the floor where the school supplies had been kept. “It was all in big white boxes. It was right here. Did anyone see them? Did anyone move them?”

At this, one child asked, “Were they white boxes here by the recycling bins? … Oh, I thought those were for recycling and took them out to the curb last week.”

My heart sank. My poor child who was trying to help the family had unintentionally thrown away all my hard work that summer. And here it was, with the school year starting, and none of the kids had what they needed. I completely broke down in tears right at the spot where the boxes once sat.

This, no doubt, would be a sad moment for any parent. But the disappointment and stress of it overwhelmed me in a way that shook me to the core. I called my husband in tears. “I can’t take the kids to school! … No, I can’t! They don’t have any of the supplies! … I don’t have time to get new supplies! I don’t know what to do!” He talked me through it and tried to assure me that it was all going to be OK and that the teachers would understand. But I was not in a condition to hear any of that. There was something deeper going on inside me that prevented me from taking that in. There was a part of me telling myself: “You’re a failure. You can’t do this! You’re a bad mom. You let your kids down. You can’t fix this problem even if you tried.” I had been exhausted from the baby not sleeping through the night, and I had so many other things I needed to get done that day. I didn’t have time. I didn’t have it in me to go to Walmart. And besides, all the school supplies would already be picked over. So, I just stood there in the garage in tears, on the phone with my husband and with my children staring at me. I was paralyzed and unable to process what had just happened.

Eventually, I somehow managed to get all the kids in the minivan and drive to the school to meet the teachers. I tried to explain what happened but simply broke down in tears again. I had to leave and get back home where I spent the day feeling as if I had just experienced some traumatic event. I had been so used to packing my days with a fury of activity, running after dozens of items on my to-do list for our family, but on this day, I just couldn’t function. “What is happening to me? Why am I reacting like this?” I wondered.

The Facade

In marriage, we can think we have it all together. We have a facade that “all is good.” After all, we have to live up to Christmas card pictures that highlight what a beautiful family we have. And other couples don’t seem to be having problems in their marriages and family lives. So, we convince ourselves we are keeping up with everyone else.

Beth: That is how I lived much of our first fifteen years of marriage. On the surface, I thought I was doing pretty good as a Catholic wife and mother. I had had eight babies. I brought them to daily Mass. I had homeschooled them when they were younger. Now I had most of them either in a good classical school or a co-op program. I also had them in music lessons, soccer, and spelling bees. I had a lot going on, but I was at least somehow holding it all together as I had told myself a good Catholic wife and mother should.

But the events surrounding the start of that new school year pushed me to a new limit. I had recently had my eighth baby, and it had been a stressful pregnancy. We were doing an addition to the house and a kitchen renovation at the same time. And shortly after the baby was born, I had a traumatic, nearly fatal experience due to a severe allergy. With all these pressures, something inside me changed. I couldn’t be the same wife and mother anymore. I noticed myself reacting in ways I didn’t want to react and not able to function as well as I had been. I had had many seasons in life before when I felt stressed and overwhelmed, but this was different. I couldn’t put it all back inside. I kept trying just to will it, to get back to where I was before. But I felt hollow on the inside. It was then, shortly after the first day of the new school year, that God made very clear to me I needed help. He sent a very wise friend who challenged me to look deeper. “I think you need to go back to counseling,” my friend said. “I think you still have stuff you haven’t dealt with from your parents’ divorce.”

That was the last thing I wanted to hear at that moment. But it was exactly what I needed to hear. That low point and my friend’s frank challenge was the start of a journey in which I began to realize there was some deeper wound in me that had nothing to do with two white boxes, school supplies, or a child’s honest mistake. And the realization of that wound—and a desire to seek God’s healing for it—turned out to be a most beautiful turning point in my life and in our marriage.

Out of the Depths

Our upbringing impacts our marriage more than we realize. Before our wedding day, we might tell ourselves, “My past doesn’t affect me. As long as I marry a good Catholic, love Jesus, and am devout, my marriage is going to turn out just fine … We will have the grace of the sacrament of Matrimony!” Yes, there are powerful graces in marriage. But grace builds on nature. And the wounds from our past do not go away simply because we have a beautiful Catholic wedding ceremony. They will come out in marriage. And that is exactly as it should be.

It’s important to understand from a theological standpoint what God is doing in this process. As God sanctifies us, he doesn’t just want to heal us of our sins. He wants to transform everything about us: our thoughts, desires, emotions, actions. Everything. This includes even the hurts from our past, patterns of relating to others, and false stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us—all the wounds that hinder us from living in his peace and his love. All this is part of our sanctification. He wants to heal the whole person and make us new.

Many of us carry wounds from our upbringing, from dysfunctional family life, from traumatic events, or from patterns of unhealthy behavior we developed over the years. Others of us might carry even deeper wounds from abandonment; parents divorcing; manipulation; a parent with alcoholism or narcissism; or physical, psychological, or sexual abuse. As God draws closer to people in any state of life, he wants to bring those wounds to our attention.

But in marriage, this process of sanctification takes on a particular shape. God sanctifies couples precisely through the ordinary demands, trials, hurts, and stresses of married life. These, in fact, are the instruments God uses to make us holy, to give us opportunities to love more—and to make us more aware of areas he wants to heal.

Rising to the Surface

Think about it: Marriage is intense. It has a unique way of bringing to the surface things in our soul that God wants to address. When two people come together for the lifelong union of marriage, our “stuff” is going to come out. Remember the simmering bone broth described in the introduction? All the imperfections have to come to the surface. Our baggage can’t remain hidden for long. This is the case for two reasons. First, marriage is so intimate. Our beloved comes to see so much about us. Outside of marriage, we might be able to manage people’s perceptions about us. We can keep hidden whatever is going on inside us and limit how much others at the office, in the parish, and on social media know about us. Not so in marriage. In marriage, there’s nowhere to hide. Everything eventually comes out into the light: all our good qualities, but also our fears, struggles, insecurities, and wounds—especially hurts from our past.

Second, this vocation pushes us to love and serve like never before. The pressures and demands of marriage and family life squeeze every ounce of energy and effort out of us. As we are stretched like never before, whatever wounds we carry start to manifest themselves in new ways. Our normal defense mechanisms and means of coping can no longer keep it all contained. We like to keep very busy, but our activity can no longer hide what is happening inside.

It all starts to come to the surface. We begin to notice ourselves acting in ways we don’t want to act. Or we interiorly respond to certain situations in ways we don’t want to respond, perhaps even ways we don’t understand. Even if we can control our outward reactions and no one else sees them, we know something inside us is off. We’re paralyzed interiorly by that feeling—feelings of anxiety, anger, envy, depression, emptiness, failure, guilt.

The Sacrament Is Working!

If you find yourself in this situation, there are four crucial things you need to keep in mind.

First, don’t panic. If you start to notice something is off—in the way you react to your spouse, in the way you treat your kids, in your inability to hold it all together—this is nothing to be ashamed of. It is not a sign that something is terribly wrong in your marriage or that you have failed in some way. It is a sign the sacrament is working! This is what marriage does. God often uses the trials and demands of married life to bring to the surface things he wants to work on in us, areas of our lives he wants to heal. So, in the course of your marriage and family life, if you start to notice deeper weaknesses and wounds—or if you begin to notice in yourself certain unusual reactions like the one I had on that first day of school—do not be alarmed. This is actually good news! It may be a sign that God is coming closer to you with his love than ever before—that he is putting his finger on something deep inside you he wants to address. It may be a sign that he is inviting you to let him into your soul in a deeper way than ever before.

Second, don’t run away from your wounds. As Jesus, the Divine Physician, draws near to those areas of our lives he wants to heal, we will be tempted to run away—to keep busy, to blame others for our troubles, or to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. It can be so painful to go there with him and revisit the hurts of our past. So instead, we run away from our wounds. We tell ourselves we don’t have a serious problem. “I went to counseling many years ago, so I don’t need any more help. All is OK now.” We fill our lives with constant activities—projects at home, ministry at the parish, advancing our career, interesting endeavors outside the home—anything to avoid sitting with the deep pain in our hearts. Or we might be tempted to blame external circumstances for our problems: “Whatever is happening inside me is not because of me.” “I would be so much happier if the world around me were different.” “My spouse needs to change.” “The kids need to behave better.” “We need more money.” “It’s problems with my job.” “It’s the stress of a new baby.”

Third, realize these hurts from the past don’t have to define us. Jesus doesn’t want us to use our wounds as an excuse for failing in love and not growing in virtue. He certainly comforts us in our affliction and wants to heal us. But he does not want us to play the victim and say, “Well, my parents wounded me. This is just the way I am. I cannot change. So, my spouse and children shouldn’t expect so much from me.” No. He actually wants us to do the hard work of meeting him in the cross of our sufferings and allowing him to bring life from those areas of darkness. If we cooperate with the healing process, we are not just comforted by God’s love. His love changes us. We say yes to a journey of healing and endeavor to grow in virtue. A sign that we are cooperating with God’s healing is that we are living our vocation better; we become more virtuous specifically with our spouse and children.

Fourth, seek help. Have the humility to recognize you have a wound that affects you, your marriage, and your family. Seek help from a good spiritual director. Seek help from a professional therapist. Often both are needed. There’s no shame in needing counseling. But it is a significant loss when you don’t get the help you need. Be willing to put in the hard work for the healing process. Your spouse is depending on you. Your children are depending on you. Jesus is longing to heal you. Will you let him in?

“I Make All Things New”

Beth: For me, that day when I broke down over the school supplies was a turning point in my life and in our marriage. I had gone to counseling earlier in life and thought I had already dealt with the impact of my parents’ divorce. I had processed it all with a counselor, worked through some of my hurts, and forgiven my parents. Wasn’t that enough? But as I went back to counseling this second time—now many years later in our marriage—I was able to take a much deeper dive, unpacking a lot more memories, wounds, and trauma that I hadn’t realized were there. I began to see more clearly how those wounds impacted my relationship with my husband, my children, my friends, and even with God: How much of a people pleaser I truly was. How I dreaded conflict. How fearful I was. How it was difficult for me to receive love.

The healing process was not easy. The time spent in therapy, spiritual direction, the chapel, confession, reading, journaling, and praying took all my strength. I felt like a wine glass that slips from your fingers and lands on a tile floor, shattering into a thousand pieces. I was that wine glass laid out and broken—allowing the child in me to finally grieve what I had lost and grieve its impact on the rest of my life. But the promise “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:25) relates to me. I was that broken wine glass made new. Jesus came in and put me together again. But that’s not all. He not only healed my heart; he also made it bigger.

And I can see the difference. I can hold much more in life. I can hold more for my husband. I can hold more for my kids. I can support them and be there for them in a way I couldn’t before. The Old Beth loved her family, but she subconsciously led more from a place of anxiety, fear, stress, and hurt—not wanting to make a mistake, not wanting to get it wrong, worried the love and security I had in my family and friendships might somehow be taken away from me. And the people I loved the most could feel that. But now, I am not coming from a place of fear or control. Now, I love them from a place of peace, healing, and wholeness. And Jesus putting me back together has increased my capacity for love and joy … and I am forever grateful.

Poking at Your Spouse’s Wound

Sometimes the way we interact with our spouse is like unintentionally poking at a deep wound.

Now that our children are older and we have teenagers who can watch the little kids, we usually go for a walk together after dinner. It gives us time for a little exercise, but even more, time to reconnect and enter into each other’s day.

Edward: One evening on our walk, I reached out to hold Beth’s hand as I often do, but after about fifteen seconds she let go. A block or two later, I tried to hold her hand a second time, but again, she quickly let go. After a third failed attempt, I felt a little hurt. “Why don’t you want me to hold your hand? Did I do something to upset you?” She then simply explained she had hurt her hand earlier in the day, and my holding it was causing her pain.

In and of itself, holding hands is not a bad thing. It is a common way couples express affection. Because of her injury, however, this otherwise normal way of connecting with my wife was actually hurting her. Once I understood this, I was no longer feeling rejected. And I didn’t reach out for her hand again that evening; I didn’t want to cause her pain.

In a similar way, our beloved might be carrying certain wounds in the heart—hurts from their upbringing, a traumatic event, or the way they were treated in a previous relationship. We might say or do something that we think is normal, or even kind and loving, but it triggers something deep in our spouse. Our beloved has a reaction that, to us, doesn’t make sense: anger, fear, defensiveness, sorrow, nervousness. We wonder, Why are you reacting that way? One wife said, “My husband would often say something that reminded me of what my dad said to me or a past boyfriend said to me, and I would feel hurt. I felt like I was being evaluated and compared again. I know he didn’t mean it in the same way, but it brought back all those emotions. I had to learn he was saying it in a completely different context, and he tried to express himself in a different way.”

Unintentionally poking at deep wounds has been a challenge we’ve had to work through in our own marriage. There are certain innocent things Beth says or does that would seem normal in other relationships but stir inside of me some hurt or fear from my past. I can react defensively with anger or withdraw in sorrow in ways I wish I wouldn’t do. I have needed to work on those reactions and get to the roots of them through spiritual direction and counseling. But I’ve appreciated how Beth is more aware of my sensitivities in these areas and tries to approach me in a way that doesn’t poke at those wounds.

From Edward’s Perspective

It has been wonderful to see the healing and transformation God has worked in my wife and in our marriage. The beautiful woman I married more than twenty years ago has become even more herself, even more at peace, and even more free to give herself to our marriage and our children.

But the process was not easy. Knowing how much divorce impacts children, I had prayed for Beth every day for healing. Ever since we were engaged, I prayed a Memorare for her—that the Lord would bring healing for her in his time and in his way. But I had no idea how hard the healing process would be for her … and for me.

Honestly, in those years as she was going through counseling and facing those deep hurts from her upbringing, things were dark in our marriage. I was scared. “What’s happening? Where did my wife go? This isn’t what I was expecting!” My cheerful, upbeat, go-getter wife was now so sensitive, often sad and shutting down in many ways. And the deeper she delved into her wounds, the more she would react strongly against me—at things I said and did, and the way I was treating her. I was beginning to realize that some of the ways I had related to her in our first fifteen years of our marriage were like me holding her hurt hand. I was regularly unintentionally poking at her wound. I felt helpless and was tempted to despair that I was only making things worse.

I really wanted to love my wife through this process, but I didn’t know how. I began to realize that there were things I needed to change. So I started going with Beth to meet with her counselor. I just wanted to understand better what was going on and how I could help. I would sit with her at the counselor’s office. I would hold her hand. I would cry with her. I would listen to her and try to understand more. I would ask the counselor questions.

Her counselor was like a doula for me. A doula is a trained birthing expert who assists a mother (and father) by answering questions and responding to emotional and physical needs when a child is on the way. We had used doulas for many of Beth’s pregnancies, and I was so grateful for them. As the dad, I don’t know what my wife needs during labor and delivery—where to massage, when to hold her hand, when to ask how she’s doing, when to stay quiet, when to leave her alone. I loved having a doula there—someone who understands labor and delivery and the mother’s needs in those moments so much better than I do and can help me love and serve Beth in the best way possible!

That’s what the counselor was for me as Beth was going through the healing process. She was like the doula. Indeed, the whole healing process is a lot like childbirth—it’s really intense and there is a lot of pain, but it’s all for a purpose, for eventually comes the joy of new life. This, in fact, is the very analogy Jesus uses to describe the work of salvation he does in our lives: “When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world” (John 16:21). But the counselor helped me better understand what was happening and how I could be more helpful during this painful process. I needed to be patient. I needed to give her more space. I needed to shoulder more at home and give her more time to work through things. I needed to change certain ways I talked to her, asked her questions, or dealt with the children that made it harder for her. I was so thankful for this guidance. I wanted to help but just needed someone to point me in the right direction. And my wife was not in a place to offer the advice and direction I desperately needed.

Some of you may not face anything as dramatic as what Beth and I did. Others might experience something more. But for all of us, there will be something from our past that will emerge. For that is what marriage does. If the sacrament is bearing fruit in your life, it will draw these wounds out of you. Your stuff will come out “for better or for worse.” It is much better if you bring it to the Lord and get the help you need to face your wounds and find healing. It is far worse if you ignore your wounds, pretend they’re not there, and suppress them. They will only come out in other unhealthy, dysfunctional ways.

Jesus the Healer

Jesus offers multiple invitations to this journey of healing. He will never force us to bring our woundedness to him. But he does invite us closer to him through the distressing circumstances that come up in our lives. These are actually great mercies, a pressing in of his presence, a time when we acutely feel the full force of the pain. We are free to turn away, to say no. But because he loves us, he will return again at a later time, with a tender touch, inviting us to explore that dark, uncharted area within.

As for our marriage, the journey continues even now and into the future. New wounds from our past and new ways to grow and love each other are regularly discovered, presented, accepted, and worked through together. What we thought we’ve already dealt with in our marriage sometimes resurfaces, revealing a totally new facet. It’s become almost rhythmic, this new uncovering of ever-deeper layers in our souls that Jesus wants to work on. But having so many of these trials behind us already, we are fortified and united together, knowing that Our Lord uses these new challenges only for our good. And that makes them easier to embrace.

So, if things do start to come to the surface in your marriage and you notice yourself reacting in ways you wish you didn’t, do not press the panic button. As St. John Paul II has said, the same God who called you to marriage continues to call you in the midst of the trials and difficulties that come up in your daily married life. Beth: That same God was calling me to go through this difficult, demanding, painful, but truly life-giving processing of healing. Edward: And that same God was calling me to remain steadfast in love, to accompany my wife through the process and do all I could to support her. And that same God may call you to a deeper level of healing—a healing that won’t be easy but will make you and your marriage new.

Reflection Questions

Prayerfully put yourself in the presence of God. Ask him if there are any wounds from your past that might impact the way you relate to your spouse. Then imagine Jesus asking you what he asked the sick man in John 5:6: “Do you want to be healed?” How would you respond?

How might Jesus be inviting you to find deeper healing in him, so that you can give the best of yourself to your spouse, your children, and others? Or how might Jesus be asking you to be supportive, patient, gentle, or even extra sacrificial to love your spouse who may be carrying deep wounds in his or her heart?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: Prayerfully put yourself in the presence of God and ask him if there are any wounds from your past—from your upbringing, from a traumatic event, or from mistakes you’ve made in life—that might impact the way you relate to your fiancé(e). How might Jesus be inviting you to get help and find deeper healing, so that you can give the best of yourself to your future spouse and your future children? How might your future spouse and children be impacted if you don’t get the help and healing you need? Or how might Jesus be asking you to support your beloved who may be carrying deep wounds in his or her heart?

8

Dealing with Differences

“No one ever told me how hard marriage really is. Two different people coming together—with two different backgrounds, two different personalities, two different approaches to life … It’s really hard!”

Edward: That is what a young woman once told me in St. Peter’s Square while waiting to see the pope. I was leading a pilgrimage to Rome for several married couples, including newlyweds, some couples married five to ten years, and some seasoned couples who were celebrating twenty-five or thirty-five years of marriage together.

We had arrived at the entrance very early in the morning to get front row seats for the papal audience. But it was still a few hours before the pope came out. So, on a beautiful spring day in St. Peter’s Square, I asked the couples to share what they had learned about marriage. That’s when this young woman, who had been married about five years, openly shared her challenges.

“No one tells you this in marriage prep. Yes, you hear that marriage is going to be hard. It will involve communication, forgiveness, sacrifice. But I had no idea! He just thinks so differently than I do. How we think through the day. How we plan for a trip. How we discipline the children. How we communicate. The way we approach money … We’re just so different!”

All the couples laughed, for they could relate to her experience. She had a great marriage. She and her husband were devout Catholics and totally committed to each other. But the differences stretched her in ways she never imagined.

“I knew we have to die to ourselves in marriage. But I never realized how much. I’m selfish. He’s selfish. I have original sin. He has original sin. And we’re thrown together in this intense thing called marriage—it’s really hard!”

This young woman was beautifully expressing a central theme to which we keep returning: in marriage, God is inviting us to take our initial love for each other to the next level. To deepen it, purify it, and make it ever more like his love. One of the main ways he does this is through our having to deal with how different our spouse is. Those differences are not merely funny, perplexing, or challenging aspects of the spousal relationship; they are the very places where Jesus wants to meet us and invite us to grow.

Loud and Soft

A wonderful couple we know learned this lesson the hard way. She came from a very loud, expressive Irish family. He came from a quiet, introverted family. In her family there could be a sudden eruption of arguing and shouting, and then minutes later, they could be laughing and having fun together as if nothing had ever happened. No emotion was kept hidden. Everybody got everything out into the open. And everybody was OK with that. Conflict and joyful family fellowship went hand in hand.

But in his family, people kept emotions to themselves. Everyone was very even-keeled. And there certainly was no conflict. Conflict was to be avoided at all costs. If people disagreed about something, they dared not voice their opinion. They would just smile and say nothing, keeping the difference of opinion to themselves. For if an argument did happen to break out or too much emotion was let out of the bag, everyone might worry something was seriously wrong.

You can imagine what happened when this man and woman came together in marriage!

There was a lot of misunderstanding in their early years as a couple. Whenever an issue would come up—she felt hurt or upset or was stressed out—she would express herself as openly as she always had done since her childhood. And whenever he witnessed her explosion of emotion, he would interpret it as a 7.8 earthquake on the marriage Richter scale and internally freak out: “Oh, no … What’s happening? … She’s really, really angry right now … She must hate me … Our marriage is falling apart!” He was not used to so much volume and emotion. So, his natural reaction was to go into silent mode, not wanting to say anything that might make matters worse.

But that just made his wife all the more frustrated. “Why is he so quiet? Why won’t he tell me what’s going on inside? Did he hear what I just said? I just poured out my heart, and he says nothing! Does he even care? Is he mad at me? Does he think I’m completely wrong here? Why won’t he just talk to me about it?” From her background, she was not used to someone going into an emotional fetal position every time there was tension. Arguing together was how her family had dealt with conflict. So, from her perspective, if he was not willing to hear her frustration and share his own—if he was not willing to argue about things—he must either be really mad at her or not care enough about her frustration.

Does Your Spouse Need to Change?

When we start to address differences like these in marriage, our first response is usually to explain and justify what we’re doing—that we are not trying to hurt the other person or that we’re not as upset or uncaring as they might think. But in doing so, we might be tempted to expect our spouse to be the one to adjust accordingly. Now that we have given such a good explanation, our spouse is the one who needs to change. “But I don’t mean it like that … You shouldn’t take it that way …” “This is just who I am … This is how I express myself …” “I’ve explained it all to you now, so you shouldn’t interpret my actions this way!”

That is, in fact, what happened in my friends’ marriage when they first started to realize they had a problem. They each initially tried to explain and defend themselves. She would say, “But that’s just how I am … I’m very expressive … I’m not terribly mad at you when I raise my voice, so please don’t take it that way.” And he’d say, “But when I go quiet, it’s because you sound so angry. If you want me to talk, you need to find a better way to express your emotions!” Notice how they were still pointing the remote control at each other and expecting the other person to change.

But Jesus was inviting them to a deeper love for each other. Jesus said, “Deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me.” If we really love our spouse, we should not be pointing the remote control at them, expecting that they deny themselves and change. We should be pointing it first and foremost at ourselves. What can I do to change? What can I do better? How can I adapt and make it easier for my spouse? How can I deny myself and pick up this cross? Love is humble. Love lowers itself to meet the other person where they are. It is willing to adjust, even to our beloved’s weaknesses and areas of sensitivity. That is, after all, what God did for us. He became one of us, entered our world, and saw things with our eyes. He came patiently to meet us where we are.

Over time, my friends beautifully grew into this deeper kind of love in ways many couples never do. She learned to tone down her emotions a bit when there was conflict. He learned that loud doesn’t mean lack of love. She learned to give him a little space, time to process and take in all that’s happening. He learned to share what he was thinking more. She was willing to make these changes not because being expressive is inherently bad but because she knew it made it harder for her husband whom she loved. And because of her love for him, she wanted to change. Similarly, he was willing to get out of his shell a bit more, not because being introverted is bad, but because he knew it would mean a lot to his wife and he knew it would lead to quicker and healthier resolutions when conflict arose in their marriage.

Unspoken Expectations

Beth: For our first four children, we waited until the baby was born to find out whether it was a boy or a girl. But for our fifth child, we decided we wanted to know at that twenty-week ultrasound. Now that we had two boys and two girls, I wanted to know the gender so I could plan rooms and clothes accordingly before the baby came.

Edward: I was less interested in finding out. I liked the element of surprise. I also liked sharing the news with everyone once the baby was born. But I saw the wisdom in finding out for planning’s sake and went with Beth to the ultrasound appointment. It was there we learned the exciting news: we were having our third boy!

It was also there that we had our first conflict regarding our fifth child.

Beth pulled out her phone to call her mom, excited to tell her the news. I, however, was shocked over what she was about to do. “What are you doing? … Are you going to tell them?”

“Yes. We should tell our folks before we tell other people.”

“Tell other people? … Why would we do that?”

“Because we just found out it’s a boy!” she said. “That’s what you do! … You tell people.”

“But we’ve never done it that way before! We’ve always waited until the baby is born. That’s when we call everyone and share the good news.”

“But this time, we found out now,” Beth explained. “So we should tell everyone now.”

“But I never agreed to that,” I replied. “I thought we were just trying to find out for our own sake, for planning, not to tell other people!”

“You mean you want me to keep this secret for the next four and a half months and not tell a single soul?”

This is just one of countless occasions when unspoken expectations have led to a misunderstanding in our marriage. Spouses often have a certain vision about traditions, holidays, and visiting family. They have different views about how to balance growing a career and growing a family and how to balance time on a screen and time in conversation together. They have different expectations about levels of discipline with the children and levels of cleanliness in the house. Even something as simple as when to reveal the gender of a child can be a source of contention.

When expectations remain hidden, just assumed, they can lead to disappointment and frustration when the other person is not abiding by our unspoken hopes. “Surely, he knows to get up and help with the baby … why is he leaving it all to me?” “She knows we need to get the kids down by this time tonight … why is there no urgency to move things along?” “It’s Sunday, so of course we’re going to visit my family.” “Certainly, he’s going to see that his shoes don’t belong here.” “She knows we haven’t had marital intimacy in a while, so surely she will be up for it tonight.” “He knows I really like flowers and will be getting them for me soon, right?”

Many of our expectations are unconscious, things we brought into our marriage based on what we saw growing up. A friend of ours worked hard to have dinner ready every day at five p.m. because that’s what her family had always done. But when her husband would come home at five fifteen, she was a little hurt. “Why isn’t he home in time for dinner? Doesn’t he want to eat together as a family? Does he realize how hard I work to get dinner ready on time?” But the husband had no expectation for a five p.m. dinner. He grew up eating much later and not at a set time each day. Moreover, his job required him to work from nine a.m. to five p.m., so a five p.m. dinner was not possible.

Having different views on dinner time caused a little tension early in their marriage, but once they had a conversation about it, she began to see that her five p.m. dinner expectation was not something essential for a good, happy marriage. It was just what she was used to from her parents’ marriage, but it was not realistic for her own.

Talking about those expectations is key. If you notice something that’s troubling you in your marriage relationship—some expectation that is not being met consistently—then be vulnerable enough to talk about it. Express your need, your desire, your hopes. And be clear about it. Don’t tiptoe around the issue. Make sure your spouse knows and understands. But most of all, be humble in how you present it. Don’t express it in an accusatory way (“Don’t you know? … Why don’t you ever …”). Be willing to change, adapt, and give up your expectation. Most of all, recognize that your personal expectation might not be what is absolutely required to have a good marriage. There may be other ways of approaching life that are just fine. So, don’t present your expectation as if it is dogma, a universal truth that must be accepted by all. Don’t think of it as the eleventh commandment: “Thou Shalt Eat Dinner at Five O’Clock” or “Thou Must Visit Thy In-Laws Every Sunday” or “Thou Must Open Christmas Presents on Christmas Eve.”

Who Needs Money? … We Have Love!

One of the biggest unspoken expectations in marriage has to do with money. Money is consistently listed as the number one cause of stress in a marriage. That comes as a surprise to many Christian couples. We might have gone into our marriages hearing that couples fight about money, but we never imagined that would be the case with us, right? “Fight about money? … We’ll never fight about money. Who needs money? We have love!”

But a few months or a few years into marriage, many of us experience a growing tension around financial matters. How we spend our money can express what we value most. Moreover, in many marriages, one person is all about the b word—the budget. They like to have a plan. They like to know what money is coming in, have a strategy for where it goes, and then make sure they stick to the strategy. They want to go after debt. They want to go after savings. And they definitely like speaking about the Budget with a capital B to remind their beloved of the need to follow the plan.

The other person, however, might approach finances with a more carefree attitude. They don’t like to worry about the numbers. They want to be generous with the children and others, and they don’t want to be restrained in their own purchases. “There was a sale!” “But the kids will really enjoy this!” “I like my $5.50 coffee … I’ve been working hard, so I treated myself to this.”

All this makes the Budget Spouse very anxious: “But what about the Budget! We can’t afford this! We don’t have all this money! We need to have a plan!” But this anxiety only makes the Carefree Spouse feel constrained, judged, and crushed. “I’m just trying to help the family … I thought this would be very helpful for us to have.”

These unspoken expectations can be an ongoing source of tension at every paycheck, every tax season, every big expenditure. But the two personalities can learn from each other. The more carefree spouse needs to see the importance of having a plan for the finances. You may need to appreciate more how your spouse’s habit of thinking through these financial matters is a great gift for the family instead of viewing it as something restricting. Maybe you need to be less carefree with spending. Maybe you shouldn’t go to your spouse with a proposed four-digit expenditure without thinking through how you can pay for the item first. Maybe you could even thank your spouse for caring for the family and thinking about the budget plan.

Meanwhile, the Budget Spouse may need to learn to get a life. Your family is not all about line items on a spreadsheet. Maybe you need to loosen up a bit and be willing to be more flexible. Maybe you are too much of a control freak, and God is inviting you to give up being anxious about financial matters: to trust in him to provide for your life more than your financial planning. Jesus himself said, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on … Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:25, 33). Moreover, if you like planning, perhaps you can build in more flexible spending for your spouse—be more generous, stretch yourself, even be willing to make a personal sacrifice to give up something you had preferred to spend money on so that your spouse can get what they’ve been dreaming of for the family.

* * * * * * *

We can see the differences in our spouse as bewildering frustrations or opportunities to encounter Jesus and love more. Indeed, Jesus is inviting us to be more patient, understanding, thoughtful, humble, or sacrificial. Not everyone views the world the same way we do. And that includes our spouse. Our spouse’s differences give us many chances to deny ourselves, give up our preferences, and love more like Christ.

Now, we will turn our attention to one more fundamental difference between you and your spouse that’s even more significant than personality, temperament, expectations, and approaches to money. In fact, so important is understanding this crucial difference that it can make or break a marriage relationship. It’s one that goes all the way back to the very beginning of the Bible—and it is so important, we need the next two chapters to address it.

Reflection Questions

What are some differences between you and your spouse that have caused friction in your marriage, such as differences in temperament, approaches to parenting, approaches to money, or expectations for family life?

What can you do to approach those differences as opportunities to love and serve your spouse rather than viewing them as merely sources of frustration?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: When we are falling in love, we tend not to notice as much the ways our beloved approaches life differently than we do—relationships, conflict, time management, money, leisure, stress, etc. And if we happen to notice some differences, we don’t think it’s a big deal. But in marriage, those little differences become big differences—and often sources of tension. What’s one difference between you and your fiancé(e) that you’ve noticed starting to become a source of tension? How can you work together with your fiancé(e) on this difference? And how might Jesus be inviting you to change? Though we tend to see these differences as sources of frustration, Jesus often gives them to us in marriage as an opportunity to love more—to be more patient, more understanding, less critical of our beloved, more willing to compromise, and more willing to give up control and not always have things our way.

9

A Woman’s Heart

Warning: We are about to share with you something that might be controversial. But after more than twenty years of marriage and having five girls and three boys, we are convinced it is simply true. Are you ready? Here it goes …

Men and women are different.

This idea, of course, is not our own. Countless ordinary people throughout the centuries have assumed this common knowledge which is as old as the first chapter of Genesis. We realize there are certain ideologies that aim at blurring the differences between men and women, but we’re convinced that God made us so beautifully different. He made us male and female, and there is a certain genius that women bring to the world that complements what men have to offer—and vice versa. And those differences make friendships, communities, and society so much richer, better, more beautiful, and certainly more interesting.

The same is true in marriage.

St. John Paul II taught that men and women tend to approach romantic relationships differently. According to John Paul, men, in general, were created with a deeper, richer sensual life than women; whereas, women have a deeper emotional life. This, of course, doesn’t mean women don’t desire sex and men don’t have feelings. It simply means that men tend to experience a more powerful sensual desire while women tend to have a deeper ability and desire to connect with others and enter into their emotional sphere.

Let’s consider these differences from the woman’s side first. St. John Paul taught that, because women have this deeper emotional life, they have a unique right in marriage to what he calls “tenderness”—the ability “to feel with and for the whole person.”10 He challenged husbands, therefore, to enter into their wives’ emotional lives. A husband must do a lot more than make money for the family and carry out tasks for his wife. Husbands who are too focused on their careers, their hobbies, or other pursuits can be emotionally distant and fail to give the tenderness their wives need and deserve. A husband must make it a priority to enter into his wife’s heart. As John Paul explains, “Tenderness creates a feeling of not being alone, a feeling that her or his life is equally the content of another and a very dear person’s life. This conviction very greatly facilitates and reinforces their sense of unity.”11 Unfortunately, many wives feel alone in their marriages because their husbands don’t realize just how much their wives need them to do this.

And this is not surprising, for men are not wired relationally the same way as women are. Many men think they’ve connected with their wives and cared for their heart (“Yeah, I really do care about her … We talk … I ask her about her day … I take her out every once in a while … I even bought her flowers last month … Isn’t that enough?”). But men don’t have the same depth of desire to connect emotionally as women do, so what they think is going above and beyond to nurture the relationship is often barely scratching the surface.

Edward: Gentlemen, learn from your own experience. Women may have a deeper emotional life, but we as men have a deeper sensual desire which our wives may not fully comprehend or appreciate since they are wired differently by God. There may be seasons of life when our wives, after several years of marriage and especially after several babies, may not be as excited about marital intimacy as we are. They may not fully understand how much a man desires sexual intimacy to express love (“You want to do it again? … Didn’t we just do that last week?”). Similarly, most men don’t fully grasp how much our wives desire our attention, how much they want us to connect with them and understand what is going on in the depths of their hearts.

Consider this fuller description of the kind of tenderness your wife needs from you. St. John Paul II says, “Tenderness is the ability to feel with and for the whole person, to feel even the most deeply hidden spiritual tremors.”12 Ponder that amazing description—“deeply hidden spiritual tremors”! Do you know what’s happening deep in your wife’s heart—her hopes and joys, her concerns and wounds? Do you feel her most deeply hidden spiritual tremors? If you’re not sure how you’re doing, ask your wife. She’ll tell you the truth. Ask her to rate you on a scale of one to ten—how well you enter into her heart, how well she feels understood, how well she thinks you are sharing in what she is experiencing in life. Be ready for a low score and don’t get defensive. Part of this exercise itself is to enable you to listen to her heart more. Then ask her what is one thing you can do to move just a little closer to ten. She will know. Remember, your wife is likely more in tune with relationships than you are. Follow her advice. This certainly won’t make up for years of being more distant than you intended. But it may be the first of many steps you can take to move things in the right direction.

From Marriage to Motherhood

John Paul II points to another reason wives deserve this special tenderness from their husbands. He explains that women often experience many significant transitions and difficulties in married life, which might include everything from pregnancy and the stresses of caring for a newborn to perhaps giving up a job and choosing to stay at home to raise the children. Some wives feel that they are on their own as they navigate these new and challenging experiences. John Paul II says wives have a special right to have their husbands accompany them with much tenderness amid these many changes.

Edward: I, however, was clueless. When we found out we were expecting our first child, we were ecstatic. But only a few days later, my wife was suddenly very different. I had no idea of the many physical, hormonal, and emotional changes a pregnant woman goes through, especially in the first trimester. Cravings. Mood swings. Smell sensitivities. And most of all, the perpetual tiredness. My intense, high-energy, get-it-done wife was now constantly so exhausted and wanting to rest. Always tired. Always on the couch. Always needing to sleep. I remember calling a friend who already had several children and asking him, “Is this normal? Do they really need to sleep this much when they’re pregnant? Are you sure?”

And then after nine months of ever-increasing discomfort, the ultimate trial arrived: labor and delivery. I really had no idea all that a woman goes through during childbirth. I had some concept of labor from the TV shows and movies I had seen, but the reality itself was so much more intense, scary, and beautiful all at the same time. I remember watching it all unfold and thinking to myself, “My wife is amazing. I could never do that!”

After it was all over, and we were bringing our baby home from the hospital, I was finally feeling relieved. I thought to myself, “The last nine months have been such a whirlwind. But, thankfully, we have our baby now. The hardest part is over. We can go back home and things can start returning to normal.”

Wow … was I in for a surprise! The constant stress of being rookie parents: learning how to change diapers, how to deal with a crying baby, not sleeping at all, the new sensation of spit-up on my shoulder, nervously checking if the baby is OK (“Is she breathing?”). And all this new terminology (“What’s a onesie?”). And no one told me about the e word that comes around day three: “engorgement.” That was totally crazy. “Why is my wife in so much pain? … Pumping? What’s pumping? … And there are machines for this? Are you kidding me?” After surviving such an overwhelming first week of parenting, I called my mom and said, “Thank you … thank you … thank you …. I had no idea all you and Dad did for me … thank you!”

Those first few weeks of parenting were quite the adventure. But we did eventually settle into a new rhythm of life together, with our marriage centered now on the joy of our daughter. I eventually returned to a regular routine at work, and most of my daytime hours started to go back to normal. I was teaching again, leading Bible studies, and hanging out with my colleagues at the college. Sure, my evenings at home looked different, helping with the baby and not getting much sleep at night. But at least most of my workday—my writing, my teaching, my career, my friendships in the office, the ministry on campus—looked similar to what they had been before the baby.

Beth: That was not the case, however, for me. While parenting stretched us both like never before, it stretched me first and in a more significant way—both physically and emotionally. Physiologically, it takes a mom at least nine months after delivering a child for her body to return fully to normal. But what was most taxing for me was the emotional drain and feeling I was missing out on something. Before the baby, I was constantly pouring my life out into the students on campus in the ministry. But over time, I was able to give less and less to the ministry as the first baby—and then the second, and then the third—demanded more of my time, energy, and attention. Within a few years, the work in ministry that had been so life-giving for me gradually receded into the background as I was having to learn to find more of my identity, meaning, purpose, and joy in the new mission God had given me in my vocation as mother (more on this later).

The transition was not easy. Indeed, many women experience a challenging shift from marriage to motherhood. While there are many priceless joys in being a mom, motherhood also places demands on the woman more than ever before. Some moms feel like they are giving something up. Some feel unseen. Almost all moms have moments when they feel very alone and overwhelmed amid these many new constant responsibilities and changes in life. That’s why St. John Paul II challenges husbands to go out of their way to show a particular tenderness to their wives in these difficult transitions.

Women Have a Special Right to Tenderness

This is especially true in an age like our own that does not appreciate the incredible value of motherhood. Our secular culture places high value on outward appearance. That’s what defines success—what you can see. Being productive, having a great career, having a fit body, making a lot of money, holding an important leadership position, having good looks, having a lot of followers and likes. This is what our secular culture praises most.

But we should not be so quick to accept the secular models of a successful life. As Christian disciples, we realize that much more important than appearance—looks, titles, position, fame, worldly accomplishment, wealth—is the invisible world: the angels, the saints, the Holy Spirit dwelling in our souls, friendship, family relationships, our personal sanctification, and the sanctification of those we love. We must be keenly aware that our world does not value what deserves our attention most. Edward: I might get praise in the office from colleagues for a well-thought-out plan or well-run meeting. I might get praise for my books or my talks or my classes. But how many people go up to my wife and say, “Thank you for washing that hand-me-down T-shirt into the third generation again … Thank you for reading Goodnight Moon for the 679th time!” How many people go up to her and say, “Thank you for staying up late with the teenagers when they wanted to talk … Thank you for teaching your little children to pray … Thank you for giving your fullest attention to your children’s development in virtue and holiness”?

Yet, in the eyes of the angels, what is truly more important? A best-selling book? A well-received conference talk? A killer line to put on my résumé? A hundred new followers? … Or the profound day-to-day, moment-by-moment work of forming children in faith, love, and virtue—forming them to be children of God? If we lived in a Christian culture that valued what’s most important in life, perhaps mothers would feel more honored and supported in their mission as the people around them rallied around and praised them for this endeavor—which is far more important than any worldly achievement, success, or social media fame.

Edward: In every age, men should thank and honor their wives for all they do. But in a culture like our own that does not value motherhood as it should, I think we as men need to go out of our way even more to show our wives the tenderness they deserve. We need to praise, honor, thank, and support them all the more since they get so little recognition from the world around them. We need to find a way to assist them in what they do, whether it’s a willingness to spend money on things like babysitting, help around the house, counseling, or a retreat or offering time when we can shoulder responsibilities on the home front in order to free up space in her heart and mind. Most of all, we need to make it a priority to listen to our wives, to find the space and time in our busy lives to connect with them consistently and enter into their emotional spheres. They long for us to enter their hearts, to “feel with and for the whole person,” even their “deeply hidden spiritual tremors.” For, as St. John Paul said, “tenderness creates a feeling of not being alone, a feeling that her or his life is equally the content of another and a very dear person’s life.”

Reflection Questions

The following questions are for both married and engaged couples:

For men: Consider the questions posed in this chapter: “On a scale of one to ten, how well do I enter into my wife’s (or future wife’s) heart? How well does she feel understood? How well does she think I am sharing in what she is experiencing in life?” If you asked your wife (or future wife) this question, how do you think she would respond? What are some things you think you can do to move closer to ten? Consider asking your wife (or future wife) these questions, and be humbly open to her feedback and advice.

For women: What are some ways your husband (or future husband) connects well with you personally and enters your heart? How well do you honor and thank him for that? What are some ways you wish your husband (or future husband) did this better? How can you best communicate that to him?

10

Men Are Not Mind Readers

Many wives express how they wish their husbands just understood what was going on inside them—how they are feeling, what they want, what they need. They have an expectation that their husbands should just know: what to do, how to respond, how to help. Doesn’t he know I like flowers? Doesn’t he know flowers worked last month, but not today?

“I wish he could read my mind!”

But ladies, we are here to tell you: that is not fair.

Remember, men and women have been created by God differently. St. John Paul II taught that women tend to have a deeper emotional life—a deeper ability to empathize, listen, understand, and enter into relationships with others. If this is generally the case, it is folly to expect your husband to have your same feminine genius. You understand your unspoken hopes and expectations. You can’t expect him to be able to read a situation like you do and know all that is going on inside.

Beth: I often see this in my sons. At least in our household, our boys seem to have a harder time noticing their present surroundings. They don’t notice the mess all over their rooms, the water spilled on the floor, or the can in the cabinet right in front of their faces. When I ask them to go look for something in the refrigerator, in the pantry, or in the deep freeze, they quickly report back, “I can’t find it, Mom … It’s not there … I don’t think we have any …” and they run back to what they were doing. But as soon as I go to look for it myself, I quickly find it. It is right there where I said it would be! I don’t have this problem as much with my girls. But my boys? They just don’t seem to be able to see! I have to go and show them where it is. “Look! It’s right here! You just need to look more carefully!”

Similarly, your husband may not always notice things as quickly or listen as carefully as you do. He may need to improve in these areas, but if there is something you really want him to be aware of, you can help him along by spelling things out for him and showing him.

Take, for example, how we often want our husbands to listen to us, especially when we have a concern, a difficulty, or something that is weighing on us. It could be a situation at school, a challenge with one of the kids, a scheduling dilemma, an important decision we have to make. We want our husbands to listen, to understand, to empathize. We don’t so much want them to go into analytical or problem-solving mode. That can come later. But first and foremost, we just want them to enter into our hearts, to connect with us and feel the weight of what we are going through. We want to know that we are not alone and that our husbands have entered into whatever we are going through. We just want them to listen.

Edward: I so often forget this. My life at work is constantly about problem solving. When someone comes to me at the office with a problem, I want to solve it. They bring me a question, and I want to help answer it. They present a certain difficulty, and I want to help alleviate it for them. All week long, people come to me with problems about budgets, resources, strategy, deadlines, delivery, quality control, accountability, recruiting, hiring, promotions, HR issues. And I want to be helpful. So, I try to answer their questions and help address the challenges they bring to my attention.

So, when my wife would come to me with questions and difficulties, I instinctively went into problem-solving mode. “Why would she come to me with some problem and not want my thoughts on how to address it?” I thought to myself. But as soon as I would go analytical on what she was sharing with me, she would get upset. “Will you just listen to me? I’m not asking for your advice! I just want you to listen!” I simply have had to learn to listen more attentively, try to understand her situation better, and empathize with what she is going through. She doesn’t want me to problem solve with her until she feels I have really listened and entered into whatever is weighing on her heart.

Communicating Better

Beth: We have learned over the years some helpful habits so that we are able to communicate better with each other. Whenever I have a new or out-of-the-box idea, one that I feel a little vulnerable even mentioning, I work to prepare my uber-analytical husband first. “Hey, I have an idea and I just need you to be open to it right now” is my go-to opening. That signals to him that I just want him to listen, hear me out, sit with it a while, ask questions, and hopefully find something positive to say at the outset, so that I feel free to continue opening my heart to him.

We also work to respect each other’s time and current state of being when we bring questions and ideas to each other. I have learned that it is best not to ask my husband big questions when he is stressed about a deadline or rushing out the door to a meeting. Edward: I conversely have realized that even though my brain wants to talk through all the details of having people over for dinner or the state of the bank account late at night, asking right before my wife drifts off to sleep is not the ideal time for that. If we can approach each other with these issues when the other is at his or her best, we will often avoid misunderstandings, added stress, or hurt feelings. So when we see our spouse intensely in the middle of something at a time when we need something from them, it is helpful simply to ask, “Hey, when you get to a stopping point and have a minute, let me know. I need to ask you about something.” Such a question lets our spouse know that we value her work, we value his time, and we are still striving toward unity in the midst of other pressing activities.

Beth: I realized over the years that I had a bad habit when it came to communicating things that upset me in our relationship. When I would get frustrated or hurt by something my husband did, I would gloss it over and let it go. And then something else would happen, and I would do the same thing—push it down inside. But he would do another thing, and another and another action would frustrate me. Eventually, the interior pressure of these hurts and annoyances would build up and I would explode … over a seemingly minor infraction and completely out of proportion to the offense. Like a bottled carbonated beverage being shaken up over time, I’d burst out in anger and dump on him all my pent-up frustrations from the past few days. And I’d feel horrible about it. Over time, as I have come to appreciate more and more how my husband doesn’t want to upset me, I have become more forthright and honest when I notice a series of even small things that hurt me. This is not nit-picking or nagging, as if I am demanding perfection and focusing on every little thing that disappoints me. I am just constructively trying to share my perspective when things don’t sit right with me so that they don’t build up. It gives us a chance to press the reset button before things accumulate and explode. Sometimes he understands the concern and apologizes. Sometimes I come to realize I am the one who needs to adjust. But in bringing these issues up rationally, without annoyance or anger, I give him the opportunity to meet me in those shake-ups so that we can find our way back to an equilibrium together without a blowup.

But I have also discovered that it is the little things, done consistently over time, that set the stage for me to know that my concerns will be received well when they come up. Finding ways regularly to honor him, express appreciation, and show how much I treasure our relationship goes a long way. If I am doing that well, he knows that any concern I might share is coming from a place of love for him and not from a place of negative critique, nit-picking, or nagging. For example, I have made it a point that when my husband comes through the front door after work, I drop what I am doing and greet him with a warm smile and a kiss. I know food is his “love language,” so I work to make good meals that he enjoys. I try to honor him by dressing nicely like I would for visiting with friends or guests and avoid wearing anything “frumpy.” I encourage the kids to follow his lead. Little things like asking about his day, thanking him, and even making intimacy a priority can all go a long way in building up unity within our marriage, which is simply good for the relationship itself. But I find that if I consistently do these small acts of love throughout the normal course of our marriage, it has the additional benefit of making it a lot easier to talk to him about those times when I am hurt, frustrated, or overwhelmed and need him to help more, or make a change in some way.

Spell It Out

So, ladies, if there is something bothering you in your relationship, you need to tell your husband about it. Remember, your husband is wired differently than you. You can’t assume, “Well, if I get more upset maybe he will figure it out.” Your shortness with your husband or your tone of voice is not guaranteed to break through to him. If you don’t tell him what’s going on inside, he’s likely to be wondering, “Wow, she’s in a bad mood today … Why is she so upset? It can’t be me … I haven’t done anything to her today. Just because she’s having a bad day doesn’t mean she should let all her frustration out on me. I’ll just avoid her until she cools down.” If you are upset, whether with your husband or with something else, consider telling him what is going on. He can’t read your mind.

The same is true on the other end: If there is something you like, something you want, something you are hoping for, you might need to spell it out for your husband. He likely will not just figure it out on his own one day. Some wives drop little hints, hoping he will notice. That usually doesn’t work either. He wants to love you, serve you, and honor you. He often just needs a little help from your feminine genius. Many husbands are not as emotionally tuned in and relationally gifted, so consider helping him out. Tell him what you want. Tell him what you need. His heart may be in the right place. He just needs some specific guidance.

Love Languages

You may have heard of the best-selling book The 5 Love Languages. According to the author, Gary Chapman, there are five general ways people express and experience love. He calls these “the five love languages,” which are words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and physical touch. Depending on our personality, we may prefer to show and receive love differently than our spouse does. So, learning your spouse’s primary love language can help you “speak their language”; it can help you express your love for your spouse not in your preferred way, but in theirs.

Beth: My love language is gift giving. I love the whole process of finding the perfect gift for a friend or family member. I want to honor the person by thinking through what they would appreciate, what would bring them joy, what would surprise them or make life easier for them. When it comes to Christmas presents, I usually begin thinking about those in October. I come up with a list of ideas for each child and family member, and then I am on the lookout for those things over the next three months.

Edward: I do not have gift giving as my love language. Of all the love languages, gift giving is the lowest on my list—and my poor wife has suffered over the years because of it! I don’t mind gifts, but I don’t get as excited about receiving them. And especially when I was single, I honestly didn’t put a lot of creative thought, time, and energy into giving them. I care about the people in my life, and I do want to buy them a nice gift, but I don’t pour my heart into it like Beth beautifully does.

To give you a sense of just how low gift giving is on the list of my love languages, let me tell you about how my Christmas gift-giving strategy was the exact opposite of Beth’s. While Beth started thinking of Christmas gift ideas in early October, I typically started the morning of December 24. When I was single, I used to wake up early on Christmas Eve each year and draw two columns on a piece of paper. I’d put a list of names in the left column and gift ideas for each person in the right column. And then I would rush out to the mall to compete with all the other last-minute shoppers and complete the list before the shops closed that evening. I sincerely cared about the people on that list. But since receiving presents was not as meaningful for me, I did not put as much time and creativity into the gift-giving process as my wife did. For me, gift giving was just a nice thing to do for Christmas or birthdays—something that you check off on a to-do list. In my mind, giving a gift is what mattered, not the amount of time and creativity put into a gift. Why other people would spend all of December constantly looking for gifts did not make sense to me, especially since by pushing myself and giving myself just one day, I could still accomplish the same goal but with much greater efficiency.

My poor wife! This woman who loves gifts, who so beautifully pours her heart into every present she buys for someone, longed for so many years for her husband, just once, to give a thoughtful, meaningful gift—something that expressed his understanding of her and his appreciation for who she is. But year after year she was so disappointed. In the early years, I’d buy her things I thought she’d find very useful: “Please don’t get me another kitchen item.” “A vacuum cleaner? Really?” Then I tried buying her clothes and was always miserably off in what styles she liked, not to mention the correct size. Sometimes presents involved fun outings she and I could do together: “You only got this because you like this restaurant.” After so many misses, I felt like a failure. I just wasn’t good at reading her heart when it came to gifts.

But then one year, I finally got it. I was so proud of myself. I noticed something she really liked, something that was important to her, something she really enjoyed, and I got it for her for her birthday.

Every Sunday for family brunch, we would make a big meal with eggs, potatoes, sausage, bacon, and … pancakes. When she served the pancakes, she would bring the generic syrup out for the family. But I noticed how she would go to a certain cabinet and pull out a small bottle of some specialty maple syrup and use it for her own pancakes. I noticed something she liked! I knew that before her birthday, I was scheduled to be giving a talk in Vermont, which is famous for its maple syrup. So, I planned to buy some high-end Vermont maple syrup and surprise her with a gift that finally meant something to her!

I came home from the trip, and the next day was her birthday, and also a Sunday brunch day—perfect! During brunch the kids each gave Mom a present, and I acted nonchalant, pretending like I was my normal, clueless self on her special day. I didn’t want her to think I might have something special up my sleeve!

After all the kids presented her gifts, she looked at me, wondering, “Did he remember to get me something?” It was then I finally smiled and pulled out my gift bag for her. I was so excited for her to open it, like no other gift I had ever given her before. I put her pancakes on her plate and told her to reach inside the bag. She pulled the bottle of maple syrup out and gave it a puzzled look. She glared at me, saying, “Ha … funny … is this one of your jokes?”

I got a little nervous. “No, honey, look closer. It’s high-quality maple syrup … from Vermont. I got it for you while I was there this weekend!”

She just gave me a blank stare and said, “Maple syrup? For my birthday?”

Now I knew I was in trouble.

“Yeah. It’s really high quality. From Vermont.”

“But it’s maple … syrup.”

“But honey, I noticed! This time I noticed! I noticed how you like to bring out your own specialty maple syrup for brunch each week, just for you. So I got this for you thinking you’d really like it!”

“But I’m your wife!”

“You don’t like it?”

“I’m your wife … And you just got me maple syrup … for my birthday????”

“Oh no! … I thought you’d really enjoy this … I’m so sorry if you don’t like this … But I hate to tell you that I ordered ten more containers of this syrup that are coming in the mail!”

Yes, men can be quite clueless sometimes!

Later that same year, we were at a store together in May rushing to pick up something. As we briskly passed by the purse section, Beth abruptly stopped, grabbed my arm, and pointed at a particular purse she noticed. She said to me with a big smile, “Hey, do you see this purse? That’s a really nice purse, Ted. That’s exactly the kind of purse that would be great to have someday … maybe for Mother’s Day.” And then she continued on her quick pace. I followed for about ten feet, then turned back, took a picture of the purse, and came back to the store the next week to get it for her for Mother’s Day. Score!

Thankfully, with help from my daughters and some of Beth’s friends, I have improved at least a little over the years in my gift-giving abilities. And there are many husbands who don’t struggle in this area at all and are amazing gift givers for their wives. Nevertheless, we as men typically have a number of areas where we are not as intuitive or relationally gifted as our wives. We can be unsure about how to address an issue with a child, or uncertain about what our wives really need from us or how to support them through difficult times. We often just need more “feminine genius” in our lives, and we benefit tremendously when our wives spell it out for us.

At the same time, we as men need to humbly recognize areas where we are clueless and seek help from our better halves. The more we connect with our wives heart to heart (as we saw in chapter 9)—the more we try to empathize, understand, enter into her world, and understand her desires better—the more she will feel listened to, cared for, and safe to share with us what she really needs.

Reflection Questions

The following questions are for both married and engaged couples:

For women: What are some things you wish your husband (or future husband) understood more about you, your needs, your hopes, your desires? Prayerfully ask the Lord how you can communicate that to him in a way that will be well received. Is there anything you can do differently in your daily interactions with him to make it easier for him to hear concerns you have about the relationship that may come up from time to time?

For men: How well do you listen to your wife (or future wife), to her hopes, concerns, troubles in life? How safe do you think your wife (or future wife) feels to share what is really going on inside her? Prayerfully ask the Lord what you can do to listen and understand your wife’s (or future wife’s) heart and needs better.

11

Finding Time for Prayer: The Heartbeat of Your Marriage

The most important conversation you will ever have about your marriage is not one you will have with your spouse. It is the conversation that you personally have each day with God in prayer.

We know that faithfulness to personal daily prayer—taking twenty to thirty minutes each day for quiet conversation with God—has saved and blessed our marriage in many ways. When our cup is empty and we feel like we have nothing left to give to each other and to our children, it has been Christ who has filled us up in prayer and helped us to persevere in love. When we have been hurt and tempted to build up resentment, Christ has softened our hearts in prayer and enabled us to forgive. Daily prayer has helped us to see things from the other person’s perspective, be more thankful for each other, and do difficult things together.

While many marriage programs talk about the importance of spouses praying together as a couple, few talk about the necessity for individual daily prayer. There is no doubt that coming together as a couple to pray together can enrich a marriage. But there is something even more foundational for a marriage to grow, thrive, and be truly led by the Holy Spirit—and that is faithfulness to personal daily mental prayer.

If husband and wife each don’t take time to pray on their own every day, their marriage and family will not thrive as much as God desires. We will be trying to build a Catholic home on our own, and our building will not be complete. After more than twenty years of marriage, we are convinced that what Jesus said to his disciples applies in a powerful way to marriage and family life: “Without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). We need to live deeply from our interior lives so that the Spirit truly guides all that we do in our marriage and family. But that can only happen by encountering Jesus in personal daily prayer.

Radiating Christ

Early in our marriage, we spent time with St. Teresa of Calcutta’s sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, serving with them and praying with them. It was then that we came across a beautiful prayer they recited each day after Mass. It speaks to the heart of why personal daily prayer is so important for one’s vocation:

Dear Jesus …
Shine through us
and be so in us
that every soul we come in contact with
may feel Your presence in our souls.
Let them look up, and see no longer us,
but only Jesus!13

What a beautiful prayer! Think about the line … “that every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our souls.” Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if every soul we interact with each day would see not just us, but Jesus shining through us!

Let’s apply this prayer to our vocation. Do we want our spouse and children to encounter just us, or Jesus shining through us? The only way to give our spouse and children the best—which is Jesus himself loving them through us!—is to deepen our interior life through the commitment to daily prayer.

Edward: I sincerely love my wife. And my love for Beth has a number of good qualities. But I know it’s far from perfect. I know that my love for her is tainted by pride, selfishness, fear, and wounds I have. On my own, I’m not able to love Beth the way I want to love her, the way she deserves to be loved. I need Jesus to love her through me.

Beth: Similarly, I genuinely love my children. But sometimes my love for them is hindered by my self-centeredness, impatience, and lack of understanding. On my own, I’m not able to love them as they deserve to be loved. I know I need Jesus loving them through me. I want to give my children more than just me—my personality, my planning, my teaching, my helping them. I want to give them Jesus radiating through me. But this can only happen if I cultivate an interior life and make daily personal prayer a top priority.

Caffeinated Spirituality

But is daily prayer realistic for parents of several little children? Is it possible to fit in daily prayer amid the chaos of raising young ones?

Beth: There was a season of life when my commitment to daily prayer began in an interesting way the previous night. Before going to bed, I used to make my coffee and put it in a thermos which I placed by my bedside. When I woke up in the morning, my coffee was right by my side, and I could open my blinds, look out at the beautiful Rocky Mountains, open my Bible, and begin my morning prayer, sipping on my coffee so I could be more fully awake for the Lord.

Some of you, however, might wonder about my strange coffee routine the night before. Why not make a fresh cup each morning? Because in my household of eight children, if I walk downstairs to the kitchen in the morning, I will never make it back up to the quiet sanctuary of our bedroom to get my prayer time in! As soon as any of our eight kids would hear me crack open the door and start to come down the steps, it would be game over: “Mom, could you get me a drink?” “I can’t find my shoes!” “Could you sign this for me?” “Where’s my lunch?” That’s why I would try to wake up earlier than the children to get my time of prayer in and fill up with God first, so that when I walked down those steps and encountered my children, they encountered not just me. I know that, on my own, I don’t have enough to give them. But if I’m abiding in him, Jesus can make up for all that I lack. Think of it this way: my life as a mom is like a lamp. You have to plug the lamp into the outlet for it to shine and bring light to a room. Similarly, if I want Christ’s light to shine through me and for his love to touch the hearts of my children in all we do together, I know I need to plug in to God for daily prayer.

Still, working in daily prayer while growing one’s family and one’s career is not easy. Here are four things we’ve learned as a couple over the years that have helped us receive the blessings of a consistent daily prayer life:

BE FLEXIBLE in the way you pray. It won’t look like it did before.

BE CREATIVE in finding time in your busy family life to pray.

BE SUPPORTIVE of each other’s need for daily prayer.

BE FAITHFUL to personal daily prayer, which means making it a top priority every day.

Be Flexible

In marriage, we can’t cling to an old ideal of how we think our prayer life should be. We must find new ways to meet God in the midst of our vocation, for it’s precisely within the ever-changing challenges and limits of marriage and family life that Jesus wants to meet us in prayer. The one constant of family life is that nothing is constant. We need to be very flexible, willing to adapt to new situations, and be patient with ourselves in the process.

Prayer will look different in different seasons of life. When we were first married, there were no significant changes: our prayer life looked just like it had when we were single. We were able to go to daily Mass together, visit the chapel together, and often do a holy hour together. This continued even after our first child. We could still take our baby with us to daily Mass and prayer at the Blessed Sacrament chapel, at least for short periods of time. But when the baby became mobile and a second child was on the way, we noticed a more dramatic shift. We continued to go to daily Mass together, but the days of Beth and I praying a holy hour together were rare—the odds of both little children being quiet in the Blessed Sacrament chapel for more than five minutes were quite low! Beth started needing to pray at home more, and I would fit my Adoration time in during my day at work. We both kept up a prayer life, but it was changing, and it wasn’t together as much anymore. With the arrival of our third child, the changes became more significant as we were outnumbered, exhausted, and stretched like never before.

Edward: For me, the most challenging shift I ever experienced in my prayer life came when we had our fourth child. We had just said goodbye to dear friends in Kansas, where we had lived for nine years, and moved to Colorado, where I started a new job. We had the pressures of the big move, a new job, and a new baby—three of the biggest stresses in marriage coming at us all at once! But the most troubling part for me was that all these changes were causing my prayer life to take a nosedive. After a few months in our new home, I simply could not get into a rhythm of prayer that looked anything like it had before. In our small town in Kansas, we had lived just a few blocks from our parish church, where the doors were open 24/7 and there was perpetual Eucharistic Adoration. Our family easily could go to Mass together there each morning before I went to work, and I could easily spend time with Our Lord every day in the Adoration chapel. I had a beautiful routine of prayer every morning, midday, and evening, as we lived so close to Our Lord at this small church.

But in the area where we had moved, there was, at the time, no Adoration chapel nearby. The Mass schedule conflicted with my work schedule. And we were completely overwhelmed by boxes to unpack, getting acquainted with a new community, starting a new job, and most of all, taking care of four little children who were six and under, including our newborn.

Our baby had severe allergies and a terrible time sleeping through the night. We were constantly waking up at all hours with his cries, scratching, infected wounds, need for cream, and need for medicine. After months of no sleep and the stress of trying to identify the problem, we were completely distraught—physically, emotionally, and spiritually, too. In those months, I woke up with the crying baby at four or five a.m. most mornings so that Beth could get at least a few hours of sleep. And that’s when I would desperately try to engage in some semblance of prayer for my soul.

It was far from ideal, though. I would pace back and forth in our living room, holding the baby in one hand and a copy of Thomas à Kempis’ spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ in the other. The only way my son would stay calm was for me to keep moving and never sit down. But I also knew it was the only time I would have in the day for quiet—and hence, the only time I could get my prayer in. So there I was, holding my son while pacing back and forth in my living room for an hour or two, barely keeping my eyes open and trying to meditate on a few lines from the Imitation, while getting thousands of steps in before the sun came up. This was a far cry from my beautiful family daily Mass routine and the long periods of time I had sitting quietly before Our Lord each day in Eucharistic Adoration back in Kansas. After several weeks of what seemed to me like a sham prayer life, I lamented to my spiritual director about my new daily prayer routine: “I wonder if I made the wrong decision to come out here. My prayer life has completely fallen apart. I can’t even do a holy hour anymore!”

It was then that my spiritual director said something I’ll never forget: “Ted, you are doing your holy hour. You are loving Jesus in your state of life right now, in your vocation. You are loving Jesus in your child and loving him in your wife by serving her in this way. And the most important thing is that you are still being faithful to prayer. You are meeting Jesus in the circumstances of your life and still finding a way to get time with him in prayer each day. It might not be in a chapel right now. And you might not be able to get to daily Mass as frequently as you once did. But you are meeting him where he wants to meet you most—in your vocation.”

My spiritual director went on to assure me that this challenge was likely only for a certain period of time, that eventually I would settle into a new routine and be able to get back to Adoration and daily Mass more regularly. And in the end, that all came true. But the point I took away from that particularly stressful season in life is that we cannot be too attached to a certain way we like to pray—a certain time, place, or method. We need to be flexible. God wants to meet us in our vocation, and the demands of our vocation must come first. So, it’s within the new contours of each new season of marriage and family life that we need to find the time to pray each day. The time for prayer might change. The location might change. The style of prayer might change. If walking around the living room holding a baby is the only time one can pray, then that’s the time God wants to meet us.

As married men and women, we are not monks and nuns. We certainly must find some time each day to pray—as we will see below, faithfulness to daily prayer is absolutely essential—but we can’t cling to a certain ideal about prayer and devotion if it does not fit with the demands of marriage and family life. Our vocation shapes what the routines of our daily prayer life looks like, not the other way around.

Be Creative

Beth: God loves it when we go out of our way to make time for him in prayer, especially when we feel completely drained and it is difficult to fit it in with a bunch of little children who need us 24/7. This is true particularly for moms. Now that my kids are older and in school, I can go to Mass after I drop them off in the morning and spend some time with the Lord in prayer after Mass. But when I had several little ones at home and was homeschooling, it was harder. Rounding everyone up in the middle of the day to get to Mass was often a stressful adventure. Sometimes we were late. Sometimes a child wasn’t wearing matching shoes. Sometimes they were hungry and fussing. It wasn’t always pretty. But looking back on it all, I think what the Lord saw was not the fidgety child or mismatched shoes. He saw our hearts and rejoiced that we tried our best to come worship him at daily Mass when we could.

But there were other seasons of life when I was not able to bring the children to daily Mass as regularly as I would have liked: after a move, after a baby, after the first trimester of the next child. But I longed to go to Mass. I told Jesus how much I wanted to receive him. And I tried my best to get there with the children whenever I could.

I also had to get very creative about working in my daily prayer time. When the kids were young, I was not able to get to Adoration often. Maybe once or twice a week when Ted was able to watch the kids in the evening I would get to spend time with Jesus in a holy hour. Sometimes I would stop in the Adoration chapel with the kids for just two or three minutes to say a quick hello in the middle of a busy day. Most of my prayer life, however, was not in a chapel. Most of it wasn’t even in a nice quiet corner of the house with a beautiful view out my window or a sacred icon to look at. It might be at the kitchen table while eating lunch. It might be in a rocking chair late at night while nursing a baby. It might be sitting in the backyard while the kids were playing. Sometimes it was broken up in little pieces throughout the day: five minutes of prayer before the children knew I was awake; ten minutes during a child’s nap; and five more minutes later in the day when the little ones were playing quietly together. There were some days when the only quiet time I ever had to myself was when I was in the bathroom—admittedly, not the ideal place to pray! But we cannot let the ideal keep us from doing what is good, especially when it comes to something as important as prayer and especially when we’re just trying to keep our head afloat while raising little children.

Of course, prayer in a beautiful chapel before the Blessed Sacrament is ideal. And prayer in a quiet cell is more conducive to the interior life than a noisy household of fussing children who constantly need us. But we are not consecrated virgins. We are called to find Jesus in prayer in the midst of our vocation as mothers. The when, where, and how of prayer may not feel ideal or allow for long periods of quiet time with the Lord as it once did before we had children. But the fact that we are finding a way each day to take in the deep breath of prayer may be even more beautiful in the eyes of God than our prayer life before we were married when it was much easier to fit it in and be present to Our Lord. Indeed, the Lord Jesus loves it when he sees us longing to be with him and fighting for that time in prayer no matter what the setting or circumstances might be.

Be Supportive

From the beginning of our marriage, we have always supported each other’s desire to get time to pray each day. We know that we’re each just so much more on our game in our vocation—happier, kinder, attentive, patient, generous, trusting, peaceful—after we’ve had our prayer time. So we make that a priority in our household for each other. Edward: But I think husbands, as the spiritual heads of the home, need to take the lead and make the necessary sacrifices so that our wives have time for prayer.

When the kids were younger, I used to wake up earlier in the morning to pray before everyone else woke up. I would either drive to a nearby chapel, or I would pray by our living room fireplace early in the morning. Then, when the kids started to roll out of their beds around six forty-five, I was free to get them ready for the day, and Beth could get time to pray before her day started. Once a week, I would take care of things after dinner and get the kids ready to go down for the night so that Beth could do a holy hour. Both husbands and wives need to be supportive of each other praying each day, but I think husbands need to make the sacrifices to ensure their wives get that time first.

Be Faithful

The most important thing is simply being faithful to daily prayer. It doesn’t have to be filled with warm feelings, beautiful spiritual thoughts, or delightful consolations from the Lord. Much of the prayer life of the saints was hard, dry, and empty. Just like any relationship of love, the measure of our prayer life with Jesus is not the feelings we get out of it but our faithfulness. Did we show up? Did we make it a priority to find the time to be with Jesus each day? Did we do all we could to talk to our Beloved, to make space in our frantic days for intimate conversation with the Lord? It is in these small ways amid the demands of our vocation that we express our love for God.

And here, we should be clear. By daily prayer, we mean more than saying prayers like the Our Father or Glory Be. We mean more than devotions like the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet. We also mean more than praying the Liturgy of the Hours or even the highest form of prayer, the Mass. All these are wonderful, but these devotions, rituals, and even the Mass itself will not bear as much fruit in our lives if we don’t take time for quiet, meditative prayer—like Ignatian meditation or lectio divina. Taking time to pray with Scripture or a good devotional book and not just to read it but to talk to Jesus about what we’re reading, to listen to him and seek how God is inviting us to apply it to our lives, is essential for cultivating the interior life, from which flows everything we do as husbands and wives.

Beth: I have had a few priests tell me in the sacrament of Reconciliation, “You’re a mom. You don’t need to spend extra time in prayer. All the things you do for your children, taking care of your home and your husband—that’s your prayer. You’re meeting Jesus every time you take care of them.”

I know these priests mean well. And we certainly are called to see the face of God in our children and our spouse. Indeed, serving our children in the countless little ways each day is one of the most beautiful, profound encounters we as parents can have with Jesus! But just because I’m a busy mom raising children does not mean I get a pass on daily prayer. It’s actually all the more the reason why I need to pray! It is the duty of every Christian disciple to give God worship and devotion in prayer. But as a mom, I also need to breathe in that deep breath of prayer so that I can be filled with God’s love when I feel so empty and so that I have much more to give my children than I could ever give them on my own. My husband and my children need me to have a daily prayer life. I need the space and time each day to pray so that I can give the very best of myself to my family.

In summary, while many marriage programs talk about the importance of spouses praying together as a couple, it is even more crucial that each individual spouse has time for personal, daily prayer. For it is from that daily encounter with Jesus—with Divine Love himself—that we draw upon the supernatural life we need to love our spouse and children. Indeed, when we make it a priority to cultivate our interior lives through daily prayer, we find that we can love each other in a way that far surpasses what we could do on our own. Daily prayer changes our hearts. It makes us more generous, patient, and forgiving. It gives us the strength to persevere when we are exhausted and overwhelmed with family life. It makes us more peaceful, trusting, and discerning when we are faced with trials, setbacks, and big decisions. It helps us to be led by the Holy Spirit more in our marriage relationship, not by our emotions. Through prayer, we begin to take on the qualities of Christ. We begin to think like him, love like him, serve like him, and sacrifice like him. All this is absolutely essential for a marriage to grow and thrive.

But without a personal daily prayer life, we are basically telling Jesus we don’t need his help. We are trying to live our marriages on our own. And when we do that, our love will always run short, like that first wine at Cana. On our own, we simply don’t have what it takes to live our marriage and family life.

But Jesus loves it when we invite him into our marriage—when we are truly humble—when we fall on our knees in prayer and beg for his help. He can’t resist humble husbands or wives who admit they don’t have it all together, who know how small and weak they really are, who know at the core of their being how much they really need God for everything in their family life—and then call out for divine assistance each day through a commitment to daily prayer. We might need to be very flexible and creative in terms of where, when, and how we pray. And spouses need to be supportive of each other getting time for prayer. But giving primacy to our interior lives is absolutely essential. When we as spouses make personal daily prayer a priority, when we fight for the time for daily prayer, we give our spouse and our children something so much greater than ourselves. We give them Jesus radiating through us.

Reflection Questions

“Be flexible”: How is Jesus calling you to meet him in daily prayer within the circumstances of your marriage and family life right now? How might this look different from times past? How difficult is it for you to surrender to this new time, way, or place for praying?

“Be faithful”: Prayerfully reflect on Jesus’ words, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). How do these words apply to your life as a spouse and/or parent? Does the way you live your life reflect this reality of how much you need Jesus in daily prayer? What are some creative ways you can make sure you get time to pray each day?

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: Now is the time to make sure you have the habit of consistent, daily prayer. You want this habit going into your marriage, as it’s harder to cultivate when you are pressed with the many demands of marriage and family life. Do you take time on your own—individually—to pray consistently, every day? Not just saying prayers or reading, but having quiet time in God’s presence to talk to him, to listen to him, to meditate on the Scriptures or a good Catholic spiritual text? Are you faithful to prayer each day, or do you tend to put other things in front of your relationship with God? Are you convinced that you need God for everything in your life? What can you do to learn more about how to pray and to develop a consistent prayer life? Take time to reflect on how much your future spouse and children need you to have a daily prayer life.

12

Beautiful Limitations: You Build a Life, and Then It Builds You

If we truly understood the radical love to which Christ calls us in marriage, we should be totally freaked out.

Edward: This is what happened to a young, devout Catholic woman I had in class a few months before her wedding day. She was already familiar with the beautiful Christian ideals of “self-giving love” and loving your spouse like Christ loves the Church. She wholeheartedly aspired to live this Biblical vision for her married life. She was a missionary who was a serious Catholic and serious about her upcoming marriage.

But I will never forget the moment when her jaw dropped and she suddenly felt the true weight of what she was about to enter into with her fiancé. We were reading a quote from St. John Paul II, and it completely rocked her world.

What Exactly Is Self-Giving Love?

When we are falling in love, the idea of “self-giving” at first sounds all beautiful and exciting. “I will give myself entirely to my spouse, holding nothing back! And I will welcome my beloved, with all my heart, as a precious gift from God!” But this overly romanticized view of love is far from the reality of day-to-day married life and far from what John Paul II actually teaches about the matter.

So this leads us to an important question: What does “self-giving” actually mean? Practically, what does it look like to “give myself” to my spouse? Do I wrap myself in a big white box, tie a red ribbon around it, and say, “Here, honey … I have a wonderful gift for you … It’s me!”

We want to make sure you understand what self-giving love exactly is in marriage, what it looks like, and how to live it. We want you to feel the weight of just how radical, how countercultural, self-giving love really is—just as that young woman in the classroom so wonderfully discovered many years ago. So, we invite you now to walk with us step-by-step through St. John Paul II’s beautiful explanation of true self-giving love.

Surrendering Our Freedom

First, John Paul II explains that every human person is unique and unrepeatable. We each have our own mind to think for ourselves and our own will to make choices about what we want to do in life. As human persons, we have free will, the power of self-determination. This is what is most uniquely our own. Another person cannot think for me or choose for me. Each person has a certain autonomy and is his “own master.”14

Second, the beauty of this gift of human freedom is that we can give it away. In other words, we can freely choose to give up that which is most intimately ours—our autonomy—and use it to serve something bigger than ourselves. Indeed, love can impel us to give up our freedom and commit our will to serve someone else. We can freely choose not to use our life for our own purposes but to commit our entire life to seeking the good of our beloved and our marriage. In fact, as John Paul II explains, love “makes the person want to do just that—surrender itself to another, to the one it loves.”15

Third, this total surrender, this profound limitation of one’s freedom, is at the very heart of married life. In marriage, we freely choose to give up our freedom to do whatever we want in life and commit ourselves to our beloved—to what is best for them and for our spousal union. Listen to how St. John Paul describes this reality: “The fullest, the most uncompromising form of love consists precisely in selfgiving, in making one’s inalienable and non-transferable ‘I’ someone else’s property.”16

It was this radical idea of surrendering one’s freedom that startled the young missionary. She suddenly began to view the prospects of her marriage with a little more fear and trembling. “Dr. Sri, do you mean I actually have to give up my freedom in marriage?” she asked. “What about my dreams? What about my plans? I don’t have to surrender those, do I? Won’t I still be free to do what I want? … I’ll just be pursuing my life plans alongside my fiancé, right? We’ll be doing it together: He’ll share in my dreams, and I’ll share in his … I don’t get why John Paul is saying I have to surrender and limit my freedom!”

It was an excellent question. And she was impressively feeling the weight of what marriage really is all about. To be clear: John Paul is not saying we have to set aside all personal dreams, hopes, and plans when we get married. But his teaching challenges us to be detached from them, to lay them at the Lord’s feet and examine how much we are seeking our life dreams within the limits of our vocation. It also challenges us to examine how much our desire for control, autonomy, and clinging to our own pursuits might be inhibiting us from giving the best of ourselves to our spouse—how much our desire to do what we want keeps us from giving the best of ourselves in our marriage and family. For it is precisely by dying to ourselves in marriage—dying to our preferences, comforts, plans, and dreams—that we find ourselves in our God-given vocation. It is only there, in our vocation, that we fully enter into God’s dreams for our lives, which are always so much bigger and better than anything we could come up with on our own.

The Law of the Gift

This leads us to the fourth and most beautiful point in John Paul’s teaching about self-giving love. Author George Weigel calls it the “Law of the Gift.” In most transactions in life, when we give something away, we don’t possess it anymore. We lose it when we give it to someone else. If I give you my twenty-dollar bill, it is no longer mine. You have twenty dollars more in your pocket, and I have twenty dollars less. If I give you an apple, you gain a tasty piece of fruit, but I don’t have that apple to eat anymore. That’s what happens in most exchanges in life.

But that’s not how love works. When I give of myself in love to someone else, I don’t lose anything. Instead, I gain so much more. I don’t lose any love; I actually increase in love. My heart expands, and my life is greatly enriched as a result. Indeed, this is where I find fulfillment in life, in using my life to serve another. As we read in the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “Man … cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”17 This is what can be called the law of the gift: “the lover ‘goes outside’ the self to find a fuller existence in another.”18

This message, however, is not easy for modern men and women to grasp. Our modern world trains us not in “self-giving” love but in what could be called “self-getting” love—what do I get out of the relationship? What does the other person do for me? Indeed, in such an individualistic world like ours, many might scoff at this whole idea of self-giving: “Why would I want to give up my autonomy and commit myself to another person like this? Why would I ever want to limit my freedom like this? It’s my life … I should be free to do whatever I want!”

Beautiful Limitations

When we were single, we each exercised a lot of autonomy. We could choose to live where we wanted, work where we wanted, and hang out with friends when we wanted. We could have our meals when we wanted, spend our money how we wanted, and keep our room clean if we wanted. We were free! But when we got married, that all changed. It was no longer about “me”: my time, my money, my plans, my friends. It was now a “we” as we were made one in marriage.

And that put new limitations on each of our lives. We each were no longer “free” like we used to be. Beth: I could no longer just go visit with friends whenever I wanted. (“See you later, honey. I’m hanging out with the gals tonight. Good luck getting the kids down on your own!”) Edward: I couldn’t just plan the weekend for what I deemed the most important tasks for the family without checking first with Beth. (“I’m going to do this yard project all weekend.”) Nor could we each spend the money on whatever we pleased. (“I passed by a dealership today and they had a sale, so I bought myself a new car!”) We had to work together on everything: schedules, finances, budgets, plans, parenting, vacations, visiting family, decisions about children’s education and activities, significant purchases … everything. I also couldn’t just run after my own career and personal dreams without involving her in every significant decision. (“Hey honey, guess what? I got a great opportunity on the West Coast, so I quit my job today and sold the house … We’re moving to California!”)

When children came, there were even more significantly felt limitations on our “freedom.” With each child, we had less and less control over our schedule. We could no longer sleep when we wanted. We couldn’t visit with friends as easily. It was a lot harder to find time to recharge and do the recreational activities that energized us. And there were incessant demands on our time and attention—change the diaper, pick up the crying baby, drive kids to their activities … endless laundry, endless dishes, endless sippy cups, and endless messes all over the house. We each had to say no to certain career opportunities, exciting trips, chances for financial gain. In certain seasons of life when we were overwhelmed with a newborn, finding time just to go to the bathroom or take a shower was challenging!

Some may wonder, “If marriage and family life is this demanding and this exhausting, why would anyone want to do this?” It’s true: marriage takes a lot out of us—financially, emotionally, physically. It certainly places many limits on our freedom.

It’s true that we may not be able to hang out with friends whenever we want or have as much money or pursue all our personal interests, dreams, and hobbies or have as much peace and quiet and sleep. But we wouldn’t trade anything in the world for each other or for Madeleine, Paul, Teresa, Karl, Luke, Josephine, Chiara, and Elinor. We are so grateful for all these beautiful limitations! They keep us grounded in what matters most in life. They constantly invite us to grow in generosity, service, and sacrifice—which is a very good thing! In the end, they do not limit us but expand our hearts. Indeed, by being willing to live within the framework of these beautiful limitations, we find a limitless opportunity to grow in what matters most: love. They make it easier for us to avoid the slavery of doing whatever we want all the time. But this crucial principle about self-giving love applies to couples with two children or no children just as much as it does to the couple with a larger family. For wherever we find ourselves in marriage and family life, we are all called to die to ourselves and give ourselves completely in service to our spouse and to what is best for our spousal relationship, for that is where we find true fulfillment in life. By freely choosing to give up our freedom to do whatever we want, we discover an even greater freedom: the freedom to love. St. John Paul II says,

Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom—it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another. Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.19

We love this quote from John Paul! It reminds us that God gave us free will for a reason: for love. In other words, we are given free will not so we can do whatever we want with it but so that we can freely choose, of our own accord, to give it away out of love. Edward: As I have written elsewhere,

God gave us freedom so that we could choose to live for others, not just ourselves …

While the modern individualist may see self-giving love in marriage as something negative and restrictive, Christians view such limitations as liberating. What I really want to do in life is love my God, my spouse, my kids, and my neighbor—for in these relationships I find my happiness. And if I am to love my spouse and kids, I must be totally committed to them and free from having my selfish desires dictate my life and rule my household. If I am enslaved to always wanting to do whatever I feel like doing, it will not be easy for me to be generous with my spouse, be patient with my children or make sacrifices for my family. It simply will not be easy for me to love them because I am habitually inclined to put my own preferences and desires above others.

That’s why I must be free from the tyranny of doing whatever I want. Only then am I free to live the way God made me. Only then am I free to experience the happiness that comes in self-giving. Only then am I free to love.”20

“My Time” Versus “Our Time”

One way to check on how well we live true self-giving love in marriage is to examine how each spouse uses his or her time. In marriage, we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of “my time” and “my spouse’s time” as two separate entities: “I need ‘my time’ and my beloved needs ‘his/her time.’ I have my interests and my spouse has his/her interests. So we have to negotiate together: I will let you do your thing if you let me do my thing.” That’s not a healthy marriage mentality.

We are one now, so we need to realize our time—how we spend our time—is not our own. It’s not “my time,” it’s “our time.” In marriage, I am not free to do whatever I want with my time. I want to be thinking about using my time for what is best for our marriage and family.

This, of course, doesn’t mean I don’t get time to do things I enjoy or pursue projects I think are important. Beth: For example, I need time to work out. Ideally, a few times a week, I like to get out of the house and go for a run with my friend, with one of my children, or on my own. I call it “my sanity.” It is like a mini-retreat, an opportunity to step back from the intensity of life. I can get time outside, in nature, where all is quiet. When I get a short break from the nonstop urgent needs in our large household, my brain switches: all the things that have been on the back burner of my mind can come to the forefront. I can think about bigger picture matters: my marriage, hopes for the children, friendships, what I am reading. It is hard to do that amid the pressures and frantic pace of daily life in the home. So when I get that time, I come back energized, refreshed, and possessing a greater clarity for what I need to do.

Edward: I know Beth needs to run. It is good for her. And it is good for our marriage and family life. She is able to give more of herself as a mom and wife when she is getting good exercise and getting time with her friends. So, I want her to have time to run—not simply because she enjoys it, but also because it’s good for us as a couple and a family.

In turn, I am a big soccer fan. I like to watch highlights from my favorite teams around the world. I sometimes go with the family to watch our local team in Colorado. Every four years, the World Cup is like a monthlong party in our household. I also enjoy playing with my kids in the backyard and organizing pickup games for friends, colleagues, and other families to join in the action.

Beth: I know that this is a fun outlet for my husband and one that he can share with our children. But I support this not just because it is my husband’s personal interest. It is good for him to be a whole person. It makes him more childlike and gives him a way to relate to the kids and be even more receptive to the good things in life. In this way, his soccer interest is good for our marriage, and it’s good for the kids to have time with dad doing something they enjoy as well.

Having personal interests and outlets like these are good for a marriage in moderation. But if one spouse spent a dozen hours each week training perpetually for the next marathon while the other spent several hours each week on a screen watching multiple soccer games, they would not be present enough to give the best of themselves to each other and to the children.

The key is talking about it together and realizing that my time is not my own to be used however I please. Now that we are joined in marriage, I must always ask, what is the best way for me to use my time for the sake of the family? And I should ask that question not on my own, but in conversation with my spouse.

* * * * * * *

This leads us to a fundamental question which we will pose next: What do we use our time, energy, and creativity on more—the pursuit of our own individual interests outside the home such as our career and hobbies or the pursuit of God’s plan for us in our vocation? These two don’t necessarily have to oppose each other. But if we are not very careful in putting first things first, we will find our hearts restlessly running after things outside the home that prevent us from giving the very best of ourselves in what truly matters most: our vocation.

Reflection Questions

How does the idea of true self-giving love—truly giving up your freedom to serve another—challenge you the most?

What is an area in your marriage and family life right now where you think God may be inviting you to surrender your freedom more—to give up control, to give up something you like, to serve more, to die to yourself more? How hard is that for you? Take time now in prayer to talk to Jesus about this. Tell him how difficult this is for you. And ask him to give you the grace to give up your “freedom” and love more like he does.

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: This chapter told the story of an engaged woman being overwhelmed by the notion of true self-giving love—of how couples in marriage freely choose to give up their freedom and commit their lives to serve their spouse. How about for you? Is this idea of surrendering your freedom scary? In what ways does this call to give up your freedom to serve your beloved challenge you? How do you think this surrendering of our autonomy to do whatever we want actually leads to an even greater freedom—the freedom to love?

13

First Things First: Giving Your Best to Your Vocation

God has an amazing plan for your life, but it may not be what you expect. Perhaps you went to college, started your career, and always dreamed of being married and having a family. But now, several years into raising children, you find yourself overwhelmed and searching for something outside the home to give your life meaning.

Things with your spouse are not as beautiful as you had hoped. And raising children takes so much more out of you than you ever imagined. Especially when you have multiple kids under the age of eight, you may feel constantly exhausted, even like you’re drowning. It seems there is no end in sight. “I have to keep doing this for the next ten to twenty years?” There has to be more to life than this.

Perhaps the greatest hardship is realizing that all you do in the home is not highly valued or even noticed by others, especially in our secular age. You pour your life into your spouse and children to build a good Catholic home, but you don’t get a lot of praise and affirmation for the countless sacrifices you make each day. No one seems to notice. In a world where everything is so public—what we eat, what we wear, sonograms, vacations—the heart of marriage and family is, by contrast, mostly a hidden life. You feel unappreciated, unseen, unknown, and you wonder if you are really making a meaningful contribution to the world.

It is right in these moments that husbands and wives need to be very careful. When we experience disappointment and tension with our spouse or feel overwhelmed or discouraged with all the demands of raising children, the Devil will tempt us to look outside the home to find our identity, meaning, and purpose in life.

Some Christian men, for example, run away from their shortcomings at home. They distract themselves with sports, hobbies, or house projects so they don’t have to face the challenges they have with their wife. Some men admit this is why they throw themselves so much into their career. They know how to succeed at work. But when their wife is frustrated and overwhelmed and the kids are out of control, they don’t know what to do. Many have never had good role models of fatherhood and often feel like failures. So instead of facing the crosses in their vocation and striving to make things better, they fall back on what they know they’re good at—their career. They’ll stay later at the office or work on the weekends so they don’t have to face the troubles they have on the home front.

Other men simply have a misplaced priority: a disordered desire for recognition, status, or wealth instead of seeing their primary mission in life in their vocation. A man might value making money, career advancement, or the prestige of a certain position too much—in a way that hurts family life. Edward: I saw this in my initial career out of college, where I worked in a highly competitive environment for a Fortune 500 company. Everyone worked intensely, doing all they could to get to the next level on the corporate ladder. And many families suffered for it. I noticed it most whenever I had to pick up something in my office late at night or on the weekend. I was shocked at how many men in their thirties, forties, or fifties were there consistently laboring late into the evening, missing dinner with their families, and still plugging away at seven, eight, or nine p.m. Even though I was single and had more time at my disposal to give to my career, I rarely worked those kinds of hours. But these men, who were married and raising children, were consistently in the office late at night and through the weekends. Even at that age, I realized how sad it was to see them pouring so much of their lives into helping the company produce and sell more product while seemingly giving so little of themselves to their wives and children.

Women also can face this challenge. Especially if moms spend several years at home full-time raising children, they can be tempted to turn elsewhere to find meaning and purpose in order to feel like they are contributing to the world again. Beth: I have felt that pull. When I had three or four kids, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to be a mom. But the one thing I do know is that I’m failing.”

In those difficult seasons of life, I remember thinking that if someone were to offer me a part-time job, I would jump at it right away. I could have regular adult interaction. I finally could do something I knew I could be good at. I could succeed and get affirmation for it. That is a lot better than staring at the pile of laundry I failed to do … again. But if I got back to some kind of work outside the home, I could use my business degree or my missionary experience again. I could be creative again. And it would be all so new and much more exhilarating than my daily drudgery of filling sippy cups, unloading the dishwasher, getting kids down for naps, and reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar countless times.

If I had a job, I would have clear marching orders. I could quickly learn how to do it, succeed, earn a paycheck, and get a pat on the back for my work. And most of all, this kind of work would be contained, in a box, for a limited time. I could have set hours. Perhaps I could even get flexible hours, working around my schedule, working when it was convenient for me. No child ever offered me flex hours! The prospects were enticing: If I started my own business or took up part-time work, my job wouldn’t wake me up at four a.m. needing something to drink. My job wouldn’t have accidents. My job wouldn’t whine, hit his sister, spit up on my clothes, or interrupt what I was trying to do a thousand times a day.

But a J-O-B also wouldn’t start to smile at me. It wouldn’t look so sweet while taking a nap. Nor would it laugh with me and be so excited to make eye contact with me. It would never crawl toward me with such eagerness to be held by me—just me, because I am his mother. It would never hug me, kiss me, draw pictures for me, and learn how to pray to God with me. It would never tell me about his day at school, bring his friends over to the house, help his little siblings, and eventually grow up and have conversations with me late at night about God, girls, colleges, and the things that matter most in life.

A Series of Simple Yeses

I want to be clear. There are many circumstances where Our Lord calls mothers to pursue work and projects outside of the home. I myself have taken on other part-time endeavors at certain points in our marriage. But I am grateful for the many priests and spiritual directors who encouraged me to keep the right balance. I am grateful for the other moms who were a few steps ahead of me in life whose example and encouragement helped me make sure that my primary focus was always on my vocation—that what clearly was number one in captivating my time, energy, passion, and attention was my marriage and my children. At least from my personal experience, looking back on those drowning years—those first ten or fifteen years of raising children when everything was so unfamiliar, demanding, and overwhelming—I can see now that the Lord was forming me as a woman of God in profound ways right in my own family life.

But it was all underneath the surface, through what I like to call “a series of simple yeses.” Countless times each day, Jesus was inviting me to say yes to him—to love and serve him in my children and in the demands of each moment with my family. He was inviting me to meet him in new ways—to realize the “sacrament” of the present moment and see the face of God present in my children. Each new season of motherhood brought its own new joys and challenges. At each stage, Jesus was also inviting me to be flexible, to adapt, to give up control, and to see where he was wanting to meet me in the new contours of life: first with a newborn, then a toddler, then starting to feel like my old self again, then a second child … and a third …

Before I had children, I liked being driven, successful, organized. I liked control. After a few children, however, that all quickly went out the window! It was humbling. I liked to achieve but felt like such a failure. I liked being appreciated and affirmed, but now I felt so invisible. Yet in the long run, this was all so good for me! Over time, I began to see how little control we all really have in life. I began to see how much I tried to rely on myself—my planning, my strategizing, my hard work. Having been humbled by motherhood, I was forced to learn to rely more on God … for everything, even in my failures. The experience taught me to encounter Jesus in my shortcomings and trust more in him. I began to pray, “Jesus, repair what I have done badly, supply what I have left undone.”21

It was also so good for my relationships with my children. No doubt, I have been far from the perfect mother, but I can see that being so fully present to my kids when they were young—filling my days with reading to them, playing with them, training them, praying with them, being so attuned to them—all that investment has made our relationship that much stronger as they have grown up through the teen and young adult years. I have a better sense of what they are feeling, what they are going through, what they need, how to connect with them, how I can be the mother they need me to be for them as they take the next step in life.

Pick Up Your Dream and Follow Me?

We know a priest who, in marriage preparation sessions, has the man and woman each talk about their dreams. Then he gives them this startling message: “Some of the plans you each have for yourself will necessarily have to die. This is what happens in marriage and family life. But then you’ll look back and see it was a good thing that they died because you will have chosen something better.”

Throughout life, various interesting opportunities and choices will come our way. But the question we must ask is, “Which of these things lead to holiness?” Our sanctity is always going to be found in fulfilling our commitments. And for those of us called to the vocation of marriage, the main way God wants to sanctify us is through our commitment to marriage and family life. This vocation forges us. We are constantly being invited to die to our personal interests, plans, hopes, and dreams to serve something bigger than ourselves. We build a life together as husband and wife, and then it builds us. Marriage and family builds us into the men and women God wants us to become, if we let it.

Instead of meeting Jesus in our spouse and children, however, husbands and wives can be tempted to look elsewhere to find greater meaning, purpose, and identity outside of the home: in a career, a hobby, making money, gaining a large following on social media, starting a small business, or even doing good work in the Church. Of course, God may give us opportunities to use our gifts to serve the wider community—and that can be a very good thing! And there are some Catholic men and women who balance family and out-of-the-home aspirations very well. But we all need to be careful that other things do not hinder our primary vocation at home. We should examine our consciences and honestly ask ourselves this important question:

To what extent am I allowing my vocation to be my primary dream?

I might have a certain outlet to express a part of myself, but is it truly in a secondary way, at the service of what should be my primary dream, my vocation? Is this secondary interest truly subordinate to my primary vocation, assisting and supporting it, or is it distracting me from the primary place God wants to meet me: in my marriage and family?

Further questions to ponder prayerfully: Am I truly giving the best of myself to my spouse and children? Do I spend more time thinking about how to advance my career or how to build a good Catholic home? Do I seek to be more united to the heart of my spouse, or do I pine for affirmation, applause, and pats on the back from the world? Am I seeking more success, more money, a prestigious position, or a platform more than I am seeking to pour the best of myself into my spouse and children?

If we are not careful, especially when we husbands and wives are more vulnerable and feel like we’re failing at home, the pop culture message “Pursue your dreams!” “Follow your passions!” “Do whatever makes you come alive!” can be quite seductive. Taking care of a crying child at two o’clock in the morning does not make us come alive. Riding the crazy hormones and emotions of the teenage years was not on our bucket list. Cleaning up vomit is certainly not life-giving.

And yet, in a certain, deeper sense, it is. As St. John Paul II often noted, we find true, lasting fulfillment only when we learn to live like Christ and give up everything for the sake of others. We find ourselves only when we give ourselves away in love. And that often requires sacrifice. But when I die to my personal comfort, interests, and desires in order to give myself away in love to my spouse and children, I don’t lose in the end. My life is more deeply enriched. I am learning to love like Christ loves. After all, Jesus didn’t say, “Fulfill yourself, pick up your dream, and follow me.” He said, “Deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me” (see Luke 9:23). This is the paradox at the heart of the gospel message. It is only when you die to yourself that you find greater life. It is only when you are not so attached—when you are willing even to surrender and die to what you want to do—that you can discover a love that is so much bigger than anything you could have imagined for yourself. For you will be living God’s plan for your life, not your own.

Not every desire and inspiration is from God. While the Lord may occasionally put certain desires on our hearts, we must remember that we are fallen human beings, and our many misguided passions and emotions often lead us astray. The responsibilities of our vocation help put certain parameters around what we should and should not do. But if we are not careful to lay all our desires at the feet of the Lord in the context of our primary responsibilities in our vocation, we may end up rationalizing our pursuit of our own will instead of his. This reminds us of the following prayer from Fr. Dominic Rover, a Dominican writer of the twentieth century, that can help keep our fallen desires in check and make sure Jesus truly reigns as the Lord of our lives: “Lord Jesus, be Lord of me, and let your plans for me come true before my dreams despoil them.”22

Are you willing to pick up the crosses in your marriage and family life, to persevere through the trials, and embrace the arduous task of laying down your life, your comfort, your interests, even your dreams, for the sake of giving the best of yourself to your spouse and children? Or will you run away from the challenges in your vocation by seeking fulfillment in something else that might be shiny and attractive by the world’s standards but will never deeply satisfy—that will leave you restless, unfulfilled, and only half the husband and father or wife and mother God made you to be?

Why We Run Away from Our Vocation

Here is a great irony about some young Catholic married couples today. When they were single, their big dream was to find their vocation, get married, and have a family. But when they finally find their spouse and start having children, they suddenly display a pressing need to dream about something else. Marriage and family life is not fulfilling them and is so much harder than they ever imagined, so they need to find a new dream.

This may be, in part, because we don’t truly understand what a vocation is. We think a vocation is about something that serves me: my happiness, my fulfillment, my well-being. Whereas, a vocation is about giving one’s self away to God or to your spouse and children to serve them.

But why is it that many devout Catholic couples today are so restless in their vocation? Why do some of us have such a pressing need to find our identity, affirmation, and fulfillment outside of the home? Why is it hard for us to make our vocation our primary dream in life? There are many reasons.

Jesus Is Enough

First, perhaps we have not truly found our identity and purpose in Christ.

Here is an important question we should all ask ourselves: Is Jesus truly enough for us? Or are we always looking for something else to fulfill us and give us our identity and purpose in life? Jesus and … something else: Jesus and success, Jesus and wealth, Jesus and praise and recognition, Jesus and the approval of certain people.

Jesus, though, is enough. Only Jesus can satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts. If we have not learned to find rest in Jesus—and in him alone—and if we have not allowed Jesus to heal the many misguided emotions and desires we have from our wounds in life, from our own fallen humanity, and from our own personal sins, we will never be at peace. We will always be running after other things to find our identity and fill the void in our hearts. And this has significant consequences for when we enter into marriage. Instead of resting with Jesus in one of the most important places he wants to meet us—in our God-given vocation—we are likely to be always hankering after something else and are likely to make other things outside our marriage and family life a priority.

Often, this is how it works. When we are single, we long for some future ideal spouse who we hope will fulfill all our needs: “Marriage will fulfill me!” But once we finally get married, we are quickly disappointed, for no spouse can carry this weight—only Jesus can. It is no wonder, then, that so many of us find ourselves restless and agitated in our vocation, “unfulfilled” being a father or mother, feeling like we’re “not growing” anymore, “not having our needs met,” and “not using our gifts.” We look elsewhere to fill the void in us. We haven’t allowed Jesus to fill that void and heal our insecurities and wounds. Our spouse cannot do that. And marriage and family life feels more like a drain than something life-giving for us. We had better look outside the home for that fulfillment, affirmation, meaning, and purpose.

But no career or job can give us our true identity. No amount of praise can satisfy the deepest longing in our heart. No amount of likes, followers, and comments will ever make us happy. Only Jesus can do that. And he wants to do that primarily as we meet him within our vocation, not run away from it.

As Christians, we might sincerely love Jesus, pray to him, and strive to follow him, but do we really find our identity and happiness in him alone? Sure, we might have gone on a retreat a long time ago and surrendered our lives to Christ. Yes, we may have genuinely experienced Jesus touching our soul, helping us overcome certain weaknesses and face certain hurts in our past. Maybe we even went to counseling for a while. But our wounds are often deep and do not go away completely. We may have experienced a good first step in the process of our healing and sanctification, but we are far from whole. It takes a long time and a lot of hard work and even more grace to get to the roots of our sins and disordered desires and truly find our deepest identity in Christ.

So, if we have not allowed Jesus to fill the void in our hearts, our personal desires and dreams can often lead us astray. Remember—we are fallen, and not every desire we have is good, even when it is for good things such as supporting our family, advancing our career, serving the Church, and evangelizing souls. If we don’t allow Jesus to heal us deeply of all those vain, disordered desires, we will spend the rest of our lives restlessly grasping for a stage, a platform, a position, an honor, a recognition to fulfill us, all the while running away from Jesus and from truly meeting him in our vocation. We will desperately seek worldly success more than sanctity, vain affirmation from the world instead of the praise of God. We need to get to a point where Jesus truly is enough and we can rest with him in our vocation.

Social Media

Second, social media gives us a false vision for life.

What we see on social media starts to shape our own aspirations in life. In times past, there used to be more groups of relatives and like-minded Catholic friends in a local, in-person community to support authentic marriage and family life, but today those communities are found largely online. Many moms, especially, might spend large amounts of time on social media and might be tempted to compare themselves to what they see everyone else doing. “All these other women are devout Catholics, and they are not just a mom! They have a ministry, a blog, a podcast, an online business. People value them and listen to them.” Some moms have described feeling less of a person because they are not doing what they see other Catholic women on social media doing. “I don’t have my outlet, so maybe I’m a failure … I can’t relate to all their success, so it’s hard for me to be a part of the group … Maybe I should find some mission outside of my home so I can connect with others better and not feel so alone, so I can be seen, listened to, understood, so others can value who I am.” But our standard for meaning, purpose, beauty, and happiness is Jesus Christ, not what we see other Catholics doing on social media. And the success of our lives will be measured by how well we lived our vocation, not how many followers, comments, or sales we gained.

Cherish Your Spouse

Third, spouses often don’t cherish each other as they should. Either they don’t know how or they don’t make enriching their spousal relationship a priority. But if we do not strive to deepen our friendship with our spouse—if we do not strive to make our spouse feel cherished, valued, and understood, our spouse is more likely to turn to other things outside the home to find fulfillment. As spouses, we need to demonstrate that we are very interested in what is happening in our marriage and in the home—that we value our marriage and family life more than whatever may be happening outside the home—and that whatever we might be doing outside the home is serving all we do together for the family. If we value and affirm it not just in our words but in our heart and in our actions, then our spouse is more likely to be secure in that love and in his or her vocation as husband and father or wife and mother. But if our spouse doesn’t feel respected, valued, understood, and cared for by us, he or she is more likely to look outside the home to fill that void.

Fourth, we sometimes do not do a good job taking care of ourselves—socially, physically, mentally, and spiritually. If we feel like our cup is constantly empty, how can we possibly continue to give so much to our spouse and our children? As discussed in previous chapters, time for daily prayer and time for each other as a couple are two crucial ways to keep our cups full. But we also need time simply to recharge our batteries. This is particularly important for moms.

Time to Recharge

Moms especially need to carve out time for whatever rejuvenates them—whether it be reading, exercising, decorating, art, shopping, or renovating. Beth: For me, I have mentioned needing time for running. It was the only time in my day when it was quiet and I was alone. I could think about other things, think about the week, do some planning while sweating in the sunshine—and get some good exercise in. I would come back reenergized and excited to see my little people again. It’s also crucial to take time to be with friends, with other women who are in a similar state of life. Just the other night, I got together with five dear friends for dinner. We had our own little space in the restaurant to ourselves and spent the night laughing together, crying together, and we closed the place down. It’s so helpful to know that you are not alone in the craziness of raising children and that other sisters in Christ are right there with you.

Husbands need to go out of their way to find time for their wife to do what she needs to do to recharge and to get together with friends. This should not be solely up to the wife to make it work. The husband needs to fight for his wife to get this time. He needs to be the one to take the initiative and make sure his wife gets this time each week. Edward: Before the kids were old enough to take care of their little siblings, I used to shoulder everything at home on Saturday mornings. We called it “Mom’s Day Out.” This gave Beth time to spend in Adoration, do some errands, go for a long run, or just relax at a coffee shop and read. We also need to get outside help if we can. If you can afford it, hire a babysitter from time to time to help watch the kids so Mom can get some solo errands checked off, visit the chapel, or hang out with other moms during the day. If you can hire someone to clean the house, that’s a huge gift for moms—even if it’s only once a month. Think of it as buying your wife’s time and her sanity. Order out food so she doesn’t have to cook dinner on occasion. If you can sacrifice elsewhere in the family budget to make things like this work, it will bless your marriage tremendously. After all, you need your wife to be in a good place in life more than you need the latest smartphone or streaming subscription.

Where God Wants to Work

Fifth, the inordinate pursuit of dreams outside the home is sometimes the symptom of a deeper problem: we are distracting ourselves from an area in our lives that God wants to work on.

We’ve discussed how marriage and family life has a way of bringing issues to the surface that God wants to address: wounds from our past, hurts from our upbringing, false views of looking at life, false stories we tell ourselves, unhealthy ways of seeking one’s identity and purpose in life. Jesus wants to heal these wounds, but that can be scary to face and requires a lot of work in our souls. It might require work with a good therapist, many hours in the chapel, and having to stare at some very dark corners of our lives. This healing process is usually not done in a matter of weeks or months but years. Rather than face all that, however, we might be tempted to distract ourselves with a big dream outside of our vocation that keeps us very busy and never allows us the time, solitude, and interior space to allow Jesus the Divine Physician to do the deep healing we really need. It is easier to throw ourselves into some project at work or some new hobby or extra project on top of all the demands at home than it is to put in the hard work of allowing Jesus to heal our souls deeply so that we can rest secure in his love.

* * * * * * *

Certainly, adventures outside the home can breathe new life into our family relationships. But what’s important for all couples to ask is whether the main adventure in their lives is their vocation. Is my marriage and my care for the people in my family truly first and of highest importance, what grabs my attention and pulls at my heart the most? Everything else I do outside the home—my career, my hobbies, my personal interests—is secondary. If something from my marriage or family starts to fall apart because of pursuits outside of the home, do I as a husband or wife have the detachment and interior freedom to pull back from those outside things that bring me such joy?

The challenge is when we seek our identity and fulfillment outside of our vocation. A warning sign is when we start to view our vocation—the needs of our children, the needs of our spouse, the potential of being blessed with another child—as a hindrance, an obstacle to doing what we want or achieving more. When a child needs our attention but we are too busy working on a screen to stop what we are doing, look our child in the eye, and respond to his or her need. When our spouse is going through a difficult time and needs more of us but we don’t want to give up certain opportunities. When we are frustrated that a child doesn’t smile enough for an Instagram post or we are inordinately fearful that another baby will keep us from advancing in our career. If we notice these unhealthy anxieties or frustrations in our hearts, we should fall on our knees and beg God to help us get back to having a heart for the people closest to us—more of a heart for them than for our pursuits outside the home. For one of the most important places God wants to meet us, shape us, and sanctify us is in our vocation and the day-to-day responsibilities we have to the people in our families.

Reflection Questions

Where do you find your identity and sense of purpose and fulfillment in life the most? In God and in your vocation? Or might there be something outside the home that regularly competes for your heart’s attention and keeps you from giving the best of yourself to your spouse and children?—Your job? A hobby? A friend-group? A project?

Prayerfully put yourself in the presence of God and consider how much time, energy, thought, and excitement you put into pursuing your career, hobbies, or other interests and projects outside of the home. Second, consider how much time, energy, thought, and excitement you put into your marriage and into your children. Then, ask the Lord what more you can do to make sure your vocation is truly primary in the way you live.

FOR ENGAGED COUPLES: You want to go into your marriage like the saints—seeking to use your life for God’s purposes, not your own. Marriage and family life is a constant reminder that we are not in charge, that we are not in control, and that we cannot always have our way! But you don’t want to wait until your wedding day to learn the art of surrendering your will and all your plans to God and laying them at the feet of the Lord—truly seeking him and his will first. What is something right now that God may be asking you to give up or change? What are the things you grasp at in life—so much so that when you start to lose your grip on them you start to lose your peace? That may be an area God wants you to surrender to him and be more detached. Developing the habit of dying to self and trusting in his plan for you is indispensable if you want to give the best of yourself in your vocation.

Conclusion

Edward: When Beth spilled her coffee all over her dress, I thought the evening would be ruined.

We were in the car on our way to a formal banquet where we were giving a keynote on the topic of this book—the realities of married life. We were having our own series of realities this day, as we were racing to get dressed for the event while making sure the kids were all set with the babysitter. We were a little behind getting out the door, had to drop off our daughter at soccer practice on the way, and got stuck in some unexpected traffic. Hundreds of people were at the event, and we didn’t want to keep them waiting. So, when I turned and noticed Beth quickly grabbing a napkin to try to dry the brown liquid oozing all over her elegant dress, my heart sank. There was no time to go back home and change, no time to stop somewhere to get a new dress. “We can’t go on stage with a big coffee stain on her dress!” I nervously thought to myself. “What will we do?”

While I was internally freaking out, Beth remained calm and focused on addressing the problem. No doubt, things were a little intense for a few minutes, but thankfully, her dress was navy blue, she got almost all the coffee off, and no one at the event would notice or have any idea of the messiness that had unfolded twenty minutes prior to our arrival.

Real married life is messy. Though most people on the outside are not aware of the drama inside our spousal relationships, we certainly are. And when we experience the common stresses, trials, tensions, and feelings of being overwhelmed in our vocation, we might be tempted to discouragement or disillusionment. We might think we’re the only ones struggling. In those moments when we feel the full weight of the demands and difficulties of marriage and family life, we might hit the panic button like I did in the car that evening.

But as we have seen throughout this book, God wants to meet us in the messiness of ordinary married life. Those challenges you have with your spouse, those stresses you experience in raising children, those uncertainties in how to be a good husband and father or wife and mother are not merely problems to be solved. They are the very places God wants to meet you, encourage you, and most of all change your heart and transform your love.

That’s certainly what we have experienced over the course of our twenty-plus years of marriage. God has taken the initial love that brought us together in marriage and transformed it, turning it into something so much better, like he changed the water into wine at Cana. I think the way Beth responded when the coffee spilled on her dress is a good analogy for how the Lord has deepened our marriage over the years. Things that used to worry, trouble, or upset us just don’t bother us like they used to. We still have many moments when we feel overwhelmed, when we have misunderstandings or hurt each other. We’re still very much a work in progress. But when we experience the messiness that comes up in our relationship, we don’t worry like we used to. We know this is just a normal part of the process of what marriage is supposed to do. The sacrament is working. Like the bone broth we mentioned in the introduction, our marriage draws all the good out of us and all the bad. Our weaknesses, wounds, and sins rise to the surface so that we become more aware of them and can allow the Lord to heal them. Indeed, our love has been purified not in spite of the many challenges we’ve faced over the years but actually through them.

The trials themselves have become truly life-giving. And as a result, we’ve come to experience a union that is so much better than what we had when we were first married—so much deeper, stronger, closer, and more joyful, more peaceful, more trusting, more confident, more intimate than anything we could have ever imagined previously. And we know this change in us came not because we merely tried harder, read the right marriage books, went to therapy, or tried some new communication skills. Those things can be helpful, but the real change in us has been so much deeper. It is something the Lord himself has worked in our hearts.

We notice a much deeper trust and intimacy, a greater confidence to put our whole heart in each other’s hands, knowing the other person is going to care for it when we do.

When misunderstandings or frustrations do come up, we are grateful for the ways the Lord has taught us not to harden our hearts and build walls of resentment, but to totally accept our spouse, even with his or her faults, and work through our tensions.

We are thankful for how we have come not only to acknowledge, but even to appreciate the differences in temperament, differences in “love languages,” differences between men and women, and differences in the ways we each communicate, think about things, handle conflict, and share what is happening inside.

We understand more profoundly the law of the gift, not just as an idea but as a way of life, experiencing the deep joy and peace that come from surrendering our own will, our own personal freedom, to serve the good of the other person, our marriage, and our family life. We have also grown in our appreciation of how the limits of our vocation are not obstacles to finding purpose, meaning, and fulfillment in life but are the very means God wants to use to shape our deepest identity in him and forge in us an even greater freedom: the freedom to love.

We know all this change in us and in our marriage—and the change God wants to work in your marriage, too—comes not on our own but through the powerful graces that come with the sacrament of holy Matrimony. So, while this book has focused not so much on the theology of marriage but on the practical living of the vocation, we would like to conclude by sharing three important theological points about Christian marriage that have helped us be more disposed to the deep work Jesus wants to do in our hearts. These three points are very basic, but profound. And, sadly, most Catholics do not know about them. They are all related to the power of the sacrament of Matrimony.

The Power of the Sacrament

Yes, we know Christian marriage is a sacrament. But do we understand what this really means? And do we draw upon the power of the sacrament in our daily married lives?

Let’s step back and consider how three amazing things happen when the sacrament of Matrimony is forged between husband and wife. These three things are of so much more importance than the dress, the tux, the flowers, the cake, and the reception. And they are of so much more use to you than any marriage book you read, marriage talk you hear, or marriage prep program you use. Do you know the three key aspects of the sacrament of Matrimony?

First, God forges a bond between husband and wife.

Think about this: When husband and wife are married, something new comes into existence that didn’t exist before. Before our wedding day, we were close friends. We loved each other. We had a wonderful relationship. But once we were married, something dramatically changed between us. In fact, something new came to be between us that wasn’t there before. It wasn’t something we could see, hear, or touch. But it was infinitely more important than the wedding rings we wore or the fact we were living together under the same roof. A new, profound spiritual reality came into existence: the bond of our marriage.

And this is not a bond we could have ever created on our own. In the sacrament of Matrimony, Almighty God himself joined us in the most profound union two human persons can have on this earth. The same God who created the sun, moon, stars, and sea also created this bond that joined us together in holy Matrimony. And this God-created bond lasts “until death do us part,” as the popular saying goes. Indeed, as the Bible teaches, the two become one (see Genesis 2:24), and “what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6).

Marriage is not a more intense form of dating, merely the next big step in a serious romantic relationship. It is not merely different from dating by degree. It is different in kind. Edward: I asked the woman who would be my wife on a date, and she said yes. We needed just the two of us to start our relationship. But marriage is completely different. As Venerable Fulton Sheen said, it takes “three to get married.” Sure, my wife and I needed to consent to this new union—it was not forced upon us. But no two humans can make a Christian marriage on their own. Only God can take us to that next level of union and love called marriage. Indeed, in holy Matrimony it ultimately is God who forges the lifelong covenant bond between husband and wife.

Do we thank God every day for the gift of this bond he has given us? Do we thank him not just for our spouse, or for our relationship, but for how he has truly united us together in such a beautiful lifelong, total, fruitful, committed love? Do we do all we can to protect this bond, to nourish it and deepen it? Does the way we live our lives reflect that this is the number one human relationship for us—that we treasure this relationship more than anything else in this world? Being aware of this bond helps us make it a priority to enrich and strengthen it throughout our lives.

Second, we become a sign of Christ’s love for the Church.

The Scriptures reveal that the true marriage is found in Christ’s love for the Church, laying down his life for his bride (see Ephesians 5). Beth: This means that what my husband and I share is not the fullest reality of what marriage is meant to be. If you want to know what marriage is, look at a crucifix. For the true marriage is the union between Christ and the Church. All our human marriages are meant to reflect that one true marriage, that “great mystery” of Christ’s love for his bride, the Church. Our human marriages participate in that reality. Husbands and wives are meant to be a living sign of Christ’s love for the Church, giving himself up for her on the Cross.

How much do our marriages look like the total, forgiving, peaceful, patient, generous, sacrificial love Jesus exhibited on Good Friday? How can we be a sign of Christ’s love for the Church if we often fight with, complain about, blame, and hurt our beloved?

We may not always think our relationship with our spouse reflects the beauty of Christ’s love on the Cross. But Jesus wants to breathe his love in us and our spouse and through us and our spouse. And this leads to the final crucial point.

Third, there is a font of grace available to married couples!

Most Catholics do not know about the amazing gift God has given them to help them live their marriages—the font of grace at their disposal to help them love like Christ loves! God has given us a tremendous power that we can draw upon in our married lives, but most Catholic couples don’t even realize it exists.

The love to which we are called in marriage is impossible to achieve on our own. We are fallen and have a wounded human nature that inclines us toward pride, selfishness, anger, and envy. On our own, we could never love our spouse as we ought. We could never love our spouse like Christ loves his Church. Jesus knows that, which is one reason why he made marriage a sacrament. He gave us a wellspring of grace, of his very divine life, to draw upon to help us love like him. This is what sanctifying grace is—Christ’s divine life in us, healing us of our weaknesses and sins, perfecting us gradually over time, and elevating us to participate in his very divine love. We know this might sound a little theological, but it is so true—and so important for daily married life! It helps us to love when we think we cannot. It helps us to give more, serve more, and sacrifice more, in ways we think are impossible. All we need to do is call upon the Lord, tell him we want to draw on the graces of the sacrament, beg him to help his life in us to grow so that we can give and forgive more … so that we can be more patient, more kind, more thoughtful, more generous … less selfish, less resentful, less proud, less lazy. Indeed, with Christ’s life in us, we are gradually changed and able to love so much more than we could ever love on our own. As St. Paul said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). We just need to remember that this treasure of graces is available to us at every moment in our marriages.

So, the next time you feel stretched and overwhelmed in your family life, you feel your cup is completely empty and you have nothing left to give, call on the graces of the sacrament to fill you up with Christ’s love.

The next time you find yourself feeling frustrated and resentful, tempted to build a wall around your heart, draw upon the grace of the sacrament and ask Jesus to help you forgive like he did.

If you ever get to a point of sorrow and discouragement, wondering if your marriage or family life will ever get better, call upon the graces of the sacrament to give you the courage to persevere, to never lose heart, to do whatever you can to repair your marriage or strengthen your family life. The graces are there; we just need to call upon them amid the various trials of married life.

These are just three simple theological points that have helped guide our marriage. And they have made a big difference. We pray that these three foundational aspects of the sacrament of Matrimony, along with insights in this book, may help you say yes to Jesus in whatever ways he is inviting you to take that next step in your marriage—that next step in the journey of where God wants to take your heart, your marriage, and the love between you and your spouse.

Appendix: A Few Words on Intimacy

When you first opened this book, you may have turned to the table of contents, scanned the list of topics, noticed the appendix on marital intimacy, and jumped immediately to this section before reading anything else—eager to see what we had to say about sex.

We get it. This is an important topic, but one that is not often discussed among friends or at church. And understandably so. The experience of sex that a particular husband and wife share is so uniquely and intimately their own, exclusively between them, and not something to share loosely with others. Yet, the mystery of marital relations remains a topic couples are very interested in learning about. For marital intimacy can be such a beautiful, joyful, unifying experience in their spousal relationship, one that expresses and deepens their love as husband and wife. But for many couples, it also can be somewhat challenging or bewildering at times: Why is this not going well? … Are we doing it the right way? … Do other couples have this struggle? … Is it OK to do this? … Are we open to having a baby tonight?

To the surprise of many young couples, as the years go by, intimacy might even become a source of frustration, disappointment, tension, or even anger in the spousal relationship: Why does he want to do this all the time? … How come she never wants to do this? … Doesn’t she know how important this is for a marriage? … Doesn’t he understand it’s not all about “him”? Some spouses might find themselves feeling used, hurt, rejected, and very alone in the very act that is supposed to be a beautiful expression of their marital union. Some might go through the motions of sex, but their heart is not in it. Others don’t even know how to articulate why they are sensing something is off in the bedroom.

Maybe you have been there before. Perhaps you have longed for something more in this aspect of your marriage. Maybe you have had seasons when you lost hope for things to get better. Maybe you are going through a period like that right now. Whatever situation in which you might find yourself at present or in the future, we have some good news for you about your sex life from a most unlikely source: a celibate priest from Poland who became pope. St. John Paul II offers important encouragement and practical wisdom for marital intimacy which we will outline below—insight that we think is very helpful for this part of married life that is not often discussed. It is something we personally and many others around the world have found immensely enriching for their marriages.

Here is the crucial thing, though: If you want to live out John Paul II’s beautiful vision for marital intimacy, you can only do so if you internalize the other topics addressed in this book.

Sex itself is not the most important, foundational part of a marriage. It is more of a barometer giving couples a sense of how well their relationship as a whole is going. If things are healthy and thriving in other aspects of a marriage, it is more likely that the sexual life of a couple also will end up going well. Indeed, striving for intimacy together in heart, mind, and soul is so much more important than finding the right technique for physical pleasure. In the end, the physical intimacy between husband and wife is meant to be an expression of the deeper personal intimacy they already share and a means to deepening that loving union.

So, if you do the hard work in your daily relationship, building a stronger friendship, trust, and union of heart with your beloved, and share life more deeply together as the years go by, then marital intimacy is more likely to become all that it is meant to be. At the same time, the experience in the sexual aspect of your marriage likely will struggle to the extent that your daily personal relationship with your spouse is struggling.

So, with all this in mind, feel free to continue reading this brief appendix, which offers just a few insights from St. John Paul II about sex in marriage. But realize that achieving this saint’s beautiful vision for marital intimacy is only possible when we appropriate all the other aspects of married love that we discuss in the chapters of this book. Our advice, therefore, is that if you want a good sex life, make sure you go back and take to heart the themes we discuss in the book itself. Those are considerably more important and more foundational than anything you will read below.

Sex Advice from a Priest?

“But why should I get advice on sex and marriage from a celibate priest?”

This is the very objection St. John Paul II answers at the beginning of his book Love and Responsibility. He explains that a priest like him may not be able to draw on personal experience of married life, yet a priest is able to offer an important perspective that most married couples cannot. From his pastoral ministry, he gains a broad experience from a wide variety of married couples and their different kinds of situations, circumstances, and challenges in their spousal relationship. He, therefore, is able to offer a much broader perspective on the realities of married life than most individual couples can on their own.

This is especially true when it comes to marital intimacy. Though this appendix is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to sex or a theological treatment on the various moral issues associated with it,23 there are a few practical insights from John Paul II’s teachings in Love and Responsibility that we think can be very helpful for couples in the sexual aspect of their relationship, especially when they begin to experience tensions, struggles, or disappointments in this area. This might happen at the very start of their marriage as they get to know each other in this new way. More often, struggles emerge after a few years of marriage, after a few kids, or after a few deeper hurts and frustrations in the relationship. They often emerge when there are more physiological and hormonal fluctuations for the woman and when for either spouse there is more busyness at home, pressures in building a career, stresses in raising children, and feelings of having no time, no energy, much exhaustion, and a hefty dose of feeling overwhelmed.

Long Before Intimacy

How well the husband and wife relate outside of sexual intimacy greatly impacts their experience of the marital act. As important as marital intimacy is for couples, “marriage cannot be reduced to the physical relationship.”24 John Paul II teaches that for the sexual aspect of the relationship to go well and to be something that helps deepen their love and union together, spouses need a healthy “emotional climate” in their overall relationship,25 an environment in which they are able to enter into each other’s lives, emotions, and experiences, “to feel with and for” the other person.26 This is especially important for the woman, who, according to John Paul II, has a deeper and richer emotional life. He explains that while the man tends to be more sensual, the woman has a greater need to connect with her husband on that interpersonal level in order to give herself more fully to her husband in the sexual act.

Beth: I know that if Ted and I are not connecting well throughout the day in the normal course of our relationship—if we have not had time to talk, to catch up and really enter into each other’s lives, if there is something weighing on my heart that he doesn’t understand, or if he upset me earlier in the day and we haven’t been able to resolve it—I am much less interested in connecting with him in marital intimacy. Ideally, I want to feel close to him on a personal level before we unite together physically.

This sheds light on why it is so important for couples to make sure they’re investing in the relationship day in and day out, entering into each other’s hearts throughout the week. Taking a sincere, active interest in each other’s life. Listening. Empathizing. Serving and honoring each other. Expressing gratitude for each other. Rejoicing together. Feeling sorrow together. This is the inner tenderness we discussed previously, which John Paul II described as “the ability to feel with and for the whole person, to feel even the most deeply hidden spiritual tremors.”27

More than Pleasure

Indeed, the sexual act is meant to be a physical expression of this deeper, personal union between husband and wife. In our secular world, however, sex is seen primarily as an act of pleasure, of sensual enjoyment or sexual release. Sex is just something fun that couples can do together: “What should we do tonight? Watch a movie? Go out for dinner? Have an ice cream? Have sex?”

But sexual intimacy is so much more. The physical union is meant to express a deeper, personal union. In giving their bodies to each other, husband and wife are giving their very selves to each other. Sex is the most profound physical union two people can have, and through it, spouses express something so beautiful to each other! When a spouse engages in the marital act, it is as if he or she is saying to the beloved, “I give myself to you completely—emotionally, spiritually, and physically—holding nothing back. And I receive you as a gift completely—emotionally, spiritually, and physically—accepting you totally.” Indeed, the bodily union of marital intimacy is meant to be a physical expression of what already exists heart-to-heart between husband and wife.

Unfortunately, spouses can go through the physical act of marital intimacy and completely miss out on this deeper, personal, unifying meaning of the act. The act is completed, but there’s not that sense of closeness. Their bodies were united together for a few moments, but they don’t leave the act closer in heart. That’s what happens when spouses don’t make it a priority regularly to enrich the relationship and connect throughout the week.

Edward: Men especially need to be aware of this reality. Since men tend to be more sensual, they more likely will be tempted to rush to physical intimacy without caring for their wife’s heart throughout the day. As we have seen, a man does not have as deep and rich an emotional life as a woman and does not easily understand how much she needs him to enter into her emotional sphere. He cannot expect her to be as quickly excited about the possibility of marital relations on a given night if he has not invested in her heart throughout the day.

This reminds me of some challenges we experienced on this front early in our marriage. In my career, I spend most of my workday talking to people—talking to people in the office for meetings, talking to people about the Catholic Faith, teaching classes, recording videos and podcasts and radio interviews. I am talking all day long! So, when I come home, I am usually tired and sometimes just want to relax quietly for a bit and not have to engage in a lot of conversation.

Early in our marriage, this habit started to become a source of tension—and an obstacle in our sexual intimacy. My wife was longing to talk to me as soon as I walked through the door. After spending all day pouring her life into our little children, Beth was excited to see me and yearning for some adult conversation. But if I ever came home and did not engage in much conversation with her because I was too distracted by work, or too tired from the day, or even worse, if I ever withdrew into some quiet “alone time”—catching up on the news or sports scores, for example—Beth did not feel valued, honored, or cared for. I was not investing in her heart. If that is how I treated her when I came home from work on a certain day, it’s no wonder she would be less interested in marital intimacy later that same evening!

As husbands, we need to go out of ourselves and enter into meaningful conversation with our wife. We need to continue pursuing her, somewhat similar to when we were dating. We need to ask her about the day. Listen to what she wants to discuss. Take a sincere interest. Ask questions. And share from our life as well. We also need to try to notice what she might need, step in and help, perform acts of service, express gratitude for her. All this goes a long way to uniting a couple where it matters most: heart-to-heart. John Paul II explains that if the man shows this kind of tenderness well, which is good and important for the marriage relationship itself, it also will have the added benefit of enriching the sexual experience.28

Finally, sex should not be used as a Band-Aid covering up deeper wounds in the spousal relationship. On one hand, a couple cannot expect the relationship to be perfect before engaging in intimacy. But on the other hand, spouses should not think that when they have struggles in their relationship, they should just have sex—that sex somehow will solve all their problems.

Some spouses might tell themselves, “It is easier to give my body to my spouse than to be vulnerable and share my heart. So I will jump into bed with my spouse rather than acknowledge the real difficulties we are having and strive to work on them together … I will just pretend everything is OK, turn off my heart to the frustration and discord I feel, and go through the motions of this act.” But this is only kicking the can down the road and likely will exacerbate the problems in the long run. Consistently approaching sex in this way is just a short-term distraction from the deeper challenges in the marriage. Though the oxytocin released during sexual intimacy might bring a feeling of closeness between spouses, no amount of oxytocin can cover up a multitude of fears, hurts, misunderstandings, and disappointments and a lack of trust and vulnerability that have been built up over the years. You might experience a fleeting feeling of closeness to your spouse for a short period of time after intimacy, but deep down, those same wounds in the marriage are still painfully there. Jesus wants to meet you in those hurts and wounds of your spousal relationship and heal them. But he cannot do that if you are turning a blind eye to those problems and using sex to distract you from what you and your beloved need to address (as we saw in the chapter on healing).

The Ideal in Intimacy

When it comes to marital intimacy itself, John Paul II teaches that an ideal for married couples to aim for is reaching climax together at the same time. Of course, this is not always possible, and couples should not be discouraged if they don’t achieve this every time, or even most of the time. Nevertheless, John Paul II holds this harmonization of orgasm as something good for couples to strive for—for the sake of their spousal relationship and for the sake of each spouse growing in virtue and self-giving love. As we will see, striving for harmonization in climaxing together is one very important way couples can grow in virtue and love together.

Let’s face it. God did not make us exactly the same in this realm. Men and women tend to be very different in how they react sexually and become aroused. As John Paul II explains, for the woman, the process is generally slower and more gradual than it is for the man, whose sexual arousal tends to be more intense faster. This dynamic makes it difficult for men and women to reach harmonization. It requires much care and loving attention, especially on the part of the man, who must be willing to spend time with his wife—often longer than he at first realizes—respecting her dignity and caring for the different way she experiences the process leading up to the sexual act. John Paul says that the man needs to be sensitive to the fact that, especially in the sexual sphere, “the woman is in a sense in another world, unlike himself not only in the physiological but also in the psychological sense.”29 Her experience of sex physically, emotionally, and psychologically is vastly different than his, and it is his responsibility to get to know this other world of hers and enter into it as much as possible—to try to understand what she experiences, what she longs for in her relationship with him, and what she needs to help her gradually move toward climax. If the man does not seek to understand her experience in marital intimacy, he will end up assuming it is similar to his own and selfishly “attempt to subject the woman to the demands of his own body, and his own psyche, frequently harming her in the process.”30

As we have seen, though a wife may not be as sensual as her husband, she needs to make sexual intimacy a priority in her marriage—and she should not withhold intimacy simply because her husband has not achieved some unrealistic ideal of perfection. She should never “keep score” in her marriage, using sex as a carrot to manage, punish, or control her husband. At the same time, John Paul II says a woman should help educate her husband so that he can better appreciate her own experience and needs in intimacy: about her need for him to enter into her heart, to give her time and space to transition from hectic family life to intimacy, to accept that she needs to go at her own pace during intimacy without pressure or resentment, to learn how she likes to be touched and what helps her gradually move toward climax.

Altruistic Intimacy: Focused on Your Beloved

All this will require from both spouses much virtue, patience, and kindness. It requires both to think about the other more than one’s self. Again, according to John Paul II, this is especially true for the man, who is generally ready for climax much quicker than the woman. The husband, therefore, is called to set aside his urgent desire to reach orgasm in order to help his wife slowly approach her own climax in her own way as a woman.

On this topic, John Paul II teaches about the importance of the man’s outward expressions of tenderness during intimacy. Outside of the marital embrace, expressions of tenderness might involve simply holding hands, putting an arm around one’s beloved, a hug, and simple forms of kissing.31 But within the context of marital intimacy, the outward expression of tenderness may involve the husband lingering with his wife for long periods of time with kisses and gentle touches and caresses, including in what John Paul II describes as her “erogenous zones,”32 and paying close attention to her reactions, so that he can help her approach climax before moving to the sexual act itself. According to John Paul II, this involves much virtue and the ability to sacrifice on the part of the man.

Precisely because a slower and more gradual rise in the curve of sexual arousal is characteristic of the female organism the need for tenderness during physical intercourse, and also before it begins and after its conclusion, is explicable in purely biological terms. If we take into account the shorter and more violent curve of arousal in the man, an act of tenderness on his part in the context of marital intercourse acquires the significance of an act of virtue—specifically, the virtue of continence, and so indirectly the virtue of love.33

Unfortunately, a husband might be tempted to rush to climax for himself without taking the time and effort to understand his wife and patiently give her the tenderness she needs to help her arrive at orgasm at the same time as he. “Intercourse must not serve merely as a means of allowing sexual excitement to reach its climax in one of the partners, i.e. the man alone, but that climax must be reached in harmony … with both partners fully involved.”34 When that consistently does not happen, the woman’s experience of the sexual act over time will usually not be a good one, and it can harm the spousal relationship itself long-term. “It must be taken into account that it is naturally difficult for the woman to adapt herself to the man in the sexual relationship, that there is a natural unevenness of physical and psychological rhythms, so that there is a need for harmonization, which is impossible without good will, especially on the part of the man, who must carefully observe the reactions of the woman. If a woman does not obtain natural gratification from the sexual act there is a danger that her experience of it will be qualitatively inferior, will not involve her fully as a person.”35

*   *   *   *   *   *

This short reflection is not a comprehensive look at marital intimacy. Even less is it about “technique.” John Paul II himself highlights that more important than technique in marital relations is creating the right “culture of marital relations” and a strong “emotional climate”36—a climate that calls husband and wife to greater mutual understanding and loving attention not just in marital intimacy, but also outside of the bedroom in the normal course of their relationship. So, in conclusion, if you want a thriving experience in marital intimacy, it is crucial to appropriate the other aspects of married love from the Catholic tradition that we discuss in the chapters of this book. If you want things in your sexual relationship to go well, we recommend that you now go back and read the book itself, internalizing those themes about building a deeper union with your spouse.

Acknowledgments

There are so many priests, couples, and families who have impacted our life as a couple—friends from Steubenville, Ohio; Atchison, Kansas; Denver, Colorado; Benedictine College; the Augustine Institute, and FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students). We would not be who we are today without their friendship, witness, example, wisdom, and support, especially in the early years of our marriage and growing family life. We are also thankful for our parents, siblings, and extended family who have shaped us in profound ways, as well as the many people throughout the years who have encouraged us to write this book. Special thanks goes to those who generously took time to offer helpful feedback on sections of the manuscript, including: Brian and Carolyn Baudoin, Michael and Julia Gearing, Edward Herrera, Luke and Shannon Hicks, Daniel and Rachel Miller, Johnny and Bridget O’Boyle, and Erin Scanlan and Jacob Falbo. We are grateful to Rick Dooley, Mike Flickinger, Jennifer Eckenrode, and the team at Ascension for inviting us to write this book and for their editorial wisdom which helped make this a better work. Most of all, we are grateful to our children, who have been a central part of—and front row witnesses to—all that has been “good, messy, and beautiful” in our marriage.

About the Authors

Edward Sri

Edward is a well-known Catholic theologian, speaker, and author of several best-selling books, including No Greater Love: A Biblical Walk Through Christ’s Passion, Walking with Mary, Into His Likeness: Be Transformed as a Disciple of Christ, and Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love.

The host of the acclaimed film series Symbolon: The Catholic Faith Explained, Edward is also the presenter of several faith formation series, including A Biblical Walk Through the Mass, Mary: A Biblical Walk with the Blessed Mother, and Follow Me: Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John. He is also a founding leader with Curtis Martin of FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), where he currently serves as senior vice president of apostolic outreach.

Edward is the host of the weekly podcast All Things Catholic, and he leads pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land each year. He holds a doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and serves as an adjunct professor of the Augustine Institute. Edward and his wife, Beth, have been married for more than twenty years, and they reside in Littleton, Colorado, with their eight children. You can connect with Edward on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and at his website edwardsri.com.

Beth Sri

Beth is a graduate of Benedictine College and was among the first FOCUS missionaries. The mother of eight children, she continues to lead and invest in those around her, encouraging young adult women as well as fellow wives and mothers in their call to marriage and motherhood through mentorship, small group gatherings, and retreats.

Beth is a contributor to The Ave Prayer Book for Catholic Mothers and a presenter in the film series Beloved: Finding Happiness in Marriage. She occasionally speaks at conferences on the topics of healing, spirituality, marriage, and motherhood. In addition, she helps lead retreats for Life-Giving Wounds, a ministry for adult children of divorce, for which she also serves on the board of directors. Beth has been a guest on many podcasts, including Among the Lilies, Made for Love, Catholic Answers, and All Things Catholic, and she sometimes leads pilgrimages with her husband to Rome.

Though not Italian, she relishes cooking up autentico Italian pastas for her growing family. When she is not in the kitchen making a quadruple batch of something or chauffeuring children somewhere, she is on long runs in the Colorado sunshine, curling up with an annotated Jane Austen novel, or boisterously cheering for her kids at their soccer games. You can connect with Beth on Instagram and Facebook or through her website borntodothis.org.

Notes

1
As cited by Fulton Sheen, Three to Get Married (New York: Scepter, 1996), 215.

2
Inspired by the witness of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who described her spirituality as “the Little Way” of spiritual childhood—of meeting God in our weakness by surrendering to the truth of our poverty and trusting entirely in his mercy and grace to transform us.

3
In 1951, Fulton Sheen wrote a book about healthy, holy marriage with the title Three to Get Married.

4
Benedict XVI, address during the Evening of Witness at the seventh World Meeting of Families (June 2, 2012).

5
John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (November 22, 1981), 51, vatican.va; emphasis added.

6
Versions of this prayer can be found on the Internet; author unknown.

7
Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), 135.

8
Wojtyla, 135.

9
Francis, Amoris Laetitia (March 19, 2016), 115.

10
Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 207.

11
Wojtyla, 207.

12
Wojtyla, 207.

13
See “Radiating Christ,” Prayer: Some of Her Favorite Prayers, Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center, accessed November 23, 2021, motherteresa.org. Based on a prayer attributed to St. John Henry Newman.

14
Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 125.

15
Wojtyla, 125.

16
Wojtyla, 97.

17
Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), 24, vatican.va.

18
Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 126.

19
Wojtyla, 135.

20
Edward Sri, Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love: Practical Insights from John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility (Cincinnati: Servant, 2007), 64–65.

21
A prayer from Fr. Jean C. J. D’Elbèe in I Believe in Love (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2001).

22
As quoted in Magnificat 23, no. 3 (May 2021): 167; emphasis added.

23
Though this section does not cover Catholic sexual ethics, following the Church’s moral teachings on human sexuality is essential for a couple’s moral and spiritual life, as well as for an authentic flourishing of the sexual aspect of one’s marriage. Failing to live in harmony with God’s plan in sexual matters does not just involve breaking a moral law; it actually hurts a couple and their marital relationship.

24
Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 275.

25
Wojtyla, 275.

26
Wojtyla, 207.

27
Wojtyla, 207.

28
Wojtyla, 275.

29
Wojtyla, 275.

30
Wojtyla, 276.

31
Wojtyla, 202.

32
Wojtyla, 269.

33
Wojtyla, 275.

34
Wojtyla, 272.

35
Wojtyla, 273.

36
Wojtyla, 275.