forsaking all others

An excerpt from a favorite book.  Every woman should read.

Finally, you marry this sinner, this man, this husband, and this person. Marriage is a choice of one above all others. Each partner promises to forsake all others, and the Bible says that man will leave his father and mother and “cleave” to his wife. Any choice we ever make in life instantly limits us. To choose to take this man as your husband is to choose not to take every other man on earth. When you decide to marry this particular sinner you have committed yourself to putting up with his particular sins even though you don’t have a clear idea of what they will be. You will begin at once to find them out, and as you do, remind yourself that you married this sinner. You can always look at other sinners and thank God you don’t have to live with their varieties of failure, but then what kind of sins would you choose if could choose which ones to live with? It’s a good thing you are not asked. You love this man who happens to be this kind of sinner and you do your best to accept, to forgive, to overlook, to forbear, and, perhaps, in the mercy of God, to help him overcome.

When you decide to marry this particular man you have decided not to marry every other man, and this particular man has limitations. You don’t start right in on his limitations. You don’t marry him with the idea of a complete renovation. When asked for advice for women contemplating marriage Mrs. Billy Graham said, “Marry somebody to whom you are willing to adjust.”

If you are a generous wife, you may perhaps allow that your husband lives up to 80 percent of your expectations. The other 20 percent you may want to change. You may, if you choose, pick away at the 20 percent for the rest of your married life and you probably will not reduce it by very much. Or you may choose to skip that and simply enjoy the 80 percent that is what you hoped for.

You marry this person. He may be the person who was, 10 years ago, the “Big Man on Campus.” You were attracted to him because he was a football star or the president of the student body or the most articulate leader of campus protests. But life settles down to humdrum. Marriage is no house party; it’s not a college campus or a stimulating political row or an athletic contest, and the man’s having been a spellbinding orator or a great halfback somehow doesn’t seem terribly significant anymore. But you ought now and then to remember what he was, to ask yourself what it was, really, that caught your eye. Come now, you will say to yourself, you didn’t marry him because he was a great halfback, did you? No, you married this person. Whatever the inner qualities were that enabled him to do the things he did then are still a part of this person that you go to bed with and eat breakfast with and wrestle over the monthly budget with. He is a person with the same potentials he had when you married him. Your responsibility now is not merely to bat your eyelashes and tell him how wonderful he is (but it breathes life into a man’s soul if you do), but to appreciate, genuinely and deeply, what he is, to support and encourage and draw out of him those qualities that you originally saw and admired.

I had been a widow for 13 years when the man I was to marry again proposed. It seemed to me the miracle that could never happen. That any man wanted me the first time was astonishing. I had gone through high school and college with very few dates. But to be wanted again was almost beyond imagination. I told this man that I knew there were women waiting for him who could offer him many things I couldn’t offer- things like beauty and money. But, I said, “There’s one think I can give you that no woman on earth can outdo me in and that’s appreciation.” The perspective of widowhood had taught me that.

Some years ago there was a series of letters to columnist Ann Landers on the subject of men who snore. Wives wrote in complaining of the countless hours of lost sleep and irritation of that awful noise beside them in bed. Others wrote offering solution, but the discussion came to an end with one letter, “Snoring is the sweetest music in the world. Ask any widow.”

How often I have sat in a roomful of people and heard a wife contradict, criticize, belittle, or sneer at her husband before the rest of the company and I have with difficult restrained myself from leaping from the chair, going over and shaking that woman by the shoulders and saying, “Do you realize what you’ve got?” She doesn’t. She hasn’t my perspective, of course. If only there were some way for every wife to have the experience of losing her husband for a little time- even of thinking that he’s dead- in order to regain the perspective she needs for genuine appreciation.

Your growth toward maturity will bring you a wider perspective. The apostle Paul, always desirous that his convert should move on into spiritual maturity, prayed for the Colossian Christians that they might see things from God’s point of view by being given spiritual insight and understanding. What could be a greater help to a wife than to see her husband as God sees him? God has created him, formed him, redeemed him, he is His. God is bringing him into perfection and it not by any means through with him yet. We are all unfinished, a long way from what we ought to be, but if we can look at ourselves and one another from God’s point of view, we’ll know where we ought to be going and in which direction our relationship should move.

Not long after my 2nd marriage we were invited to speak as a team in a church whose pastor had himself been recently remarried. He and his first wife, who had died of cancer, had been in college with me. I wanted to know what he had learned in a year of second marriage. Without hesitation he told me:

“I’ve learned that Marcie can give me things Sue could never have given. Sue gave me things Marcie can’t give. So I’ve learned appreciation- for both of them. I appreciate Marcie for exactly what she is, in a way I hadn’t the capacity to appreciate Sue.”

I know that you will not be shocked by my asking the question, nor by the man’s making comparisons between Wives One and Two. Why shouldn’t he? It’s natural, and the comparison between Marcie and Sue was made not to disparage either, but to appreciate each fully for what she was. To the Christian who has prayed for years to be led to the right partner and who believes that the one he marries is indeed God’s choice for him, it is reasonable to conclude that the personality given is the one that best complements his own, the one that meets his needs in ways he could not himself have foreseen or chosen. It is the very differences themselves that open our eyes to what we are and, if we pray for the spiritual insight and understanding that Paul prayed for, we see them as God sees them and appreciate the glorious imagination of the Creator who made them.