and that's sad.
Tiffany and I are going through premarital counseling. This is for the most part a good thing. I like the people who are our counselors. I love Tiffany. The book we are reading, however, I don’t enjoy so much. The reason for this is two-fold. On one hand, I think it paints marriage in this sappy, optimistic light that I generally don’t enjoy. On the other hand, I am only on page 15 and it has already used passages from the Bible that I think are sketchy to define male/female relationships. Let’s tackle each of these issues one at a time.
So about marriage, and the whole sappiness thing - I want to spend my life with Tiffany. I am not one of those guys that are just trying this “thing” out. I don’t have an escape plan in mind. It works or I’m screwed, that’s it. However, I don’t have false beliefs that this thing is going to be easy. And as such, I hate it when people or books depict marriage as two orgasmic, pretty-looking people holding each other in the middle of a park in Italy. (see picture of book cover- it’s our actual book cover). It’s not that I don’t want to be this happy or that I don’t think Tiffany is awesome, but I hate people who show that much affection in public. It just looks contrived to me, something people do so other people will think they are in love. Christians, more than others, tend to construe relationships under false pretenses. We pretend life is perfect and go on with our middle-class suburban lives while our kids smoke weed and our sex lives are average. I’m more prone to believe that honesty, brutal, ugly honesty, provides more joy than fake lives ever will. If this is the case, than the really happy couples aren’t the ones that hug each other at parks or make out in French diners; they’re the ones that hold hands through movies even though no one is watching. I don’t want to be a show, I want to be married forever, and this book cover seems to be alluding to more of the former.
Secondly, I’m a middler divinity student and so there is still a lot I have to learn about the Bible, but one of the key passages that freaks me out is the Ephesians passage about husbands loving their wives and wives “revering” their husbands. The work this passage is attempting to do, seems to me, to revolve around co-operation and teamwork in a marriage, something I support. However, this passage in context is not necessarily the best choice for an analysis of how co-operation is optimized. Only a few verses later Paul (the author of this book of the Bible) will tell slaves to submit to their masters in a manner that makes me question whether or not what Paul is saying can be trusted at all. I don’t think it’s wrong to use this passage; rather, I question the fact that the writers were unwilling to choose others. What does this say about their theology? Are they the kind of people that aren’t worried about problem passages? Did they knowingly place this text here because it was that good in their minds? Are they reading into Paul’s words healthy perspectives of mutual submission or unhealthy patriarchal models of Evangelical Christianity? Who knows…
In any case I still want to marry Tiffany, the people we meet with are fun, and I’m too skeptical anyway.
