I celebrated my 33rd wedding anniversary this week. During the past 33 years I have seen a marriage that (I have been told) was pointed at as what a marriage should look like and seen it be a dysfunctional one.
I have also heard many sermons, read books, gone to retreats on this subject and truthfully, it seems to me that most are at best "sometimes truth". They deal with a paradigm of what they see as average behavior and so if you fall within that average, then what they say is the truth that you need to hear, but if you are different from the "norm", then what they say will usually hurt more than help.
So, I have gone back within myself and searched my life for what seems to be the difference between a good & happy marriage and a dysfunctional one. The following is what I have noticed.
As I have looked within myself, I saw a marriage as being two intersecting circles. Each circle representing a person. When my wife and I are focusing on the intersecting area of the circles, then we are focusing on our common areas and our interest is focused towards each other. When this happens the common area of intersection grows and our marriage is a good and happy one. When we are focusing on the area within ourselves that is outside of the intersecting area, then we are focusing on ourselves and are pulling away from the other person and thus making the intersecting area smaller and causing the marriage to grow unhappy and dysfunctional. I believe that we can have activities and interests in the part of our circles that is outside the intersecting area, but that when I am focusing on the common areas then those activities are accessible to my wife as I seek to share what happened there. For instance, my wife has no interests in gun shows, so that area is outside the common area, but I grant her accessibility to that area by sharing what happens there. She then sees that my relationship to her is more important than the gun show and she can even appreciate my friendships with others knowing that they are not and will not seek to pull us apart. This also helps in that a door is open for my wife to become friends with my friends. However, when I seek to focus and not make that area accessible to my wife, that is - not to share and keep to myself and away from her, I am pulling my circle away from her and causing the common area to shrink to the point of vanishing and killing the marriage.
I also am thinking that when a person focuses on themselves to the point where there is no common area, we enter a place that the Bible describes as hardness of the heart and that is where the Old Testament law says divorce is allowable.
Anyway, that is my thinking at the moment and is subject to change as I mature.
It is important for a marriage to have a common area in the circles of the relationship. You should be able to share things and enjoy life. Yes you have your area and she has hers, but I would think that for a healthy relationship, the largest area should be that area that is a combination of the two together. No outsider should try to take that area. It is something that the two should work to have together or understand when it is no longer possible and let them part. It is a difficult thing to do either way. But if life were always easy, it would be kind of boring also.
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