Do you want to know what marriage looks like?
My wife and I watch The Bachelorette together and we play a game where each of us drafts a team of the contestants. Whomever’s man wins the show and proposes at the end wins the prize — and the prize has to be good. We’ve decided family vacations, that month’s family fun money and the name of our child based on this game (I’m kidding about the last one).
It’s funny that this is a picture of our marriage because: first it’s not fair. I have never won or gotten close to winning. We’ve played the same game with The Great British Bake-Off and I still get lacerated by Patisserie Week.
And second, it’s a show about people who have no clue what marriage is.
I know this isn’t news. But sometimes I genuinely worry for the people on the show. I just want them to understand.
Marriage is not “I’m just ready to find love.” Marriage is certainly not expensive dates in Boston, Budapest or Prague. It’s not sailing on yachts in Bermuda or Curacao with bikinis and overworked torsos. It’s not sit-downs over uneaten food in caves underneath Dublin. It’s not fighting over what he said or she said during the last cocktail party in Reykjavik. It’s not an interview with Chris Harrison after Kevin or Peter triggered “your deepest fears.”
My wife and I have been married for two years. By now we’ve heard the scenes that make up each other’s stories. We know the sins, the sorrows, the unanswered prayers and places where God was silent. We know the people who offered hope on the dark nights, we know the moments of faithfulness, the redeemed places. And we know the scary thoughts that come back sometimes.
But one night on a drive home from visiting my grandparents in Johnson City, I asked her if she’d tell me her story from start to finish. I’d heard the scenes but never placed end-to-end in the narrative one stone after the other.
She finished around Morristown and I started on mine. By the time we got to our driveway in Knoxville I had completed the story up to 2023.
“I don’t know why I’m about to cry,” I said putting the car in park and shutting off the headlights. We sat in the glow from the two lights on either side of our garage.
“It’s been a hard year.” We both wept in the car to the point where my sinuses swelled shut. I felt ridiculous at the sound of my own crying. She gave me a kiss on the forehead and said “I love you.”
That. Whatever that is. That’s what marriage looks like.
That’s a true picture of it, at least how I’ve experienced it. I do wish for the trips to Prague and Bermuda, someday. But even if those don’t come, just sitting on the couch eating PB&Js and pausing a show to talk about how screwed up we feel is as good.
Marriage is hard and self-sacrificing and also awesome because you get to be very vulnerable with someone who you know, at least in our cases, isn’t going anywhere.
So good Sam!