There is no truer saying in the world than
“When you marry someone, you marry his/her whole family.” It doesn’t matter if your family was close or
distant, if you get together every holiday or rarely see each other, or even if
you love your family to excess or want nothing to do with your family ever
again. Your family is a part of who you
are. The things you say, the things you
do, the way you think, what you believe, the way you treat people, your
emotional responses—it is all influenced in some way by family.
The second axiom of marriage says—You have baggage and your spouse has
baggage, and you both bring that into the marriage. A person’s experience of family often sets a
deeply ingrained “default” in how we experience relationships. While a multitude of things can contribute to
our behaviors, it is essential that you look at your family of origin because
the environment you grew up in—the family structure that (at least
subconsciously) taught you what it means to be family—is always at work in your
life. It is virtually impossible to fully escape the influence of your
family of origin.
So, whether you are contemplating marriage, or have been married for
over fifty years, it is incredible important to understand and be honest about
your perception of the family you came from because you will do one of two
things. Either you will repeat what you’ve experienced or you will
rebel against what you’ve experienced; and either one of those responses
can be good or bad depending on what you are repeating or rebelling
against. To improve your own marriage, you can rebel against a bad
behavior you saw modeled by one of your parents. By the same token, you
can repeat a pattern that has left generations of marriages in your family
dysfunctional. You must choose what you will do, but if you want to
choose a path to a healthy, godly marriage you must be honest about the “family
baggage” you are bringing into your own marriage.
And
amazingly, when we look at our family of origin, two things happen (and
sometimes, paradoxically, they happen simultaneously). First, we believe
that our family experience is normative. And second, we believe
that our experience is entirely unique and no one else has ever
experienced what we experienced. As ironic as it sounds, it is not
uncommon for someone who grew up with parents who yelled all the time to expect
that is how families communicate (whether he wants that for his own marriage or
not). But at the same time, he might still say, “You just don’t
understand. You can’t know what it was like growing up with him as a
father!” We believe our situations to be completely unique, but we often have
no other context from which to interpret other relationships, including our own
marriages.
So how do we process this? First, be receptive to your spouse’s
input. Your spouse can recognize patterns which originate from your
family that you might not recognize yourself. Assuming that your mate is
motivated by God's love and not by selfishness, he or she can help you identify
behaviors that need to be maintained and behaviors that need to be eliminated
for your marriage to be healthy. Second, understand how incredibly
difficult it really is to change an ingrained behavior, so continually practice
forgiveness and grace and humility with your mate. And third, never
forget that in Christ, God can still work through us in spite of our messed up
families to fulfill his divine purpose. Just look at how screwed up
Abraham’s family was, yet he is “the father of the faithful,” or David’s
family, yet he was still “a man after God’s own heart.”
We all have baggage, and we all bring that into our marriages. But, in Christ, you can become, not
just settle to be; and wouldn’t that make for an increasingly better
marriage.
******************************
To see all of the 10 Axioms of Marriage, click here.
To see a more detailed explanation of the first axiom of marriage, “At its heart, marriage is a theological relationship,”click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment