On marriage, friendship, and divorce

And the failures thereof

This post has finger pointing, and finger pointing is always dangerous because you ultimately must point the finger at yourself. So there is a good deal of "be the change you want to see in the world" sitting in this post. And I hope the two coalesce into something both meaningful and positive.

I write this post with three particular couples in mind, all now divorced. I don't think, honestly, that I was in a position to intervene in any of these, but each is a tragedy in its own way.¹ I'm grieved for each couple, because I think divorce is always a defeat. Yes, I do think there are legitimate grounds for divorce, that there are some circumstances where a marriage is substantially and essentially dead, and divorce is necessary. But it's still a defeat, a failure of both the couple (one, or both parties) and the community that ought to exist around them. A failure of one spouse, or both, to keep the promises they made.

What I want to explore in this post is the intersection of divorce and male friendship.² I found it fascinating to read of some research that 73% of American adults have been a confidante to a friend or family member about marriage or relationship difficulties. What I would like statistics on is what percentage of marriages head to divorce without a party confiding in anyone.

This is the case, at least it seems, for one of the couples I have in mind. The husband wanted the marriage to end, the wife did not. They attended counselling for years. As I understand it (vaguely) there certainly were deep-seated difficulties and causes. It's not my place here to judge that. Neither party has been willing to really make those details known. Which is actually what I want to talk about.

Was there anyone in a position to sit down with the man and speak frankly, openly, insightfully into that situation and call him to account to keep his promise, and to help the couple commit to the practices of Christian love, grace, forgiveness, repentance, honesty, and so on, that are vital if marriage is to work? To my knowledge, there was not. And here is where I wonder if some of our problems are bigger than just "oh, two people are getting divorced. That's sad."

Photo by Pedro Ramos on Unsplash

One of our problems is just individualism. We might often bemoan this, but individualism is so deeply embedded in our ways of being and thinking that it's very hard to counteract. We think of marriage as a mostly private business between two people. And we simultaneously over-value it and under-value it. We over-value it when we succumb to the idea that the primary end-goal of life is to get married and live happily ever after with a single person who is going to fulfil all your relational needs. This is why all rom-coms are comedies - they have a happy ending. The destined couple get together, and we don't typically see their "ever after" because frankly if it was perfect it would be boring and if it wasn't perfect it would shatter the illusion. We undervalue marriage when we succumb to the idea that it's not that big a deal and society shouldn't worry about marriages at all.

Marriage is also hard. Getting two sinful people together and expecting them to live in the closest proximity for the rest of their lives? That is hard. In the 1st century, in both Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts, it was different (though still hard). The nature of mortality and life expectancy meant that many people easily had 3, 4, 5 spouses. Divorce (initiated by men) was comically easy in both cultural milieus. And, marriage as an institution among Greeks and Romans was simply vastly different to most of our conceptions - it was a union for legitimate children, and men were expected to satisfy both their needs for friendship and sexual pleasure with people other than their marriage partner. We are asking human beings to spend often up to 50, 60, 70 years together. They need help to do that.

When marriages are walled gardens, no-one gets to see inside. It's hard to know, in our society, what's going on inside someone else's marriage, and most of us feel it's incredibly rude to pry. Which is why we often don't know that Mr and Mrs Y are in trouble until they're already well gone. What if we did have thicker communities that involved marriages not as walled gardens, but more as open houses? A willingness to let other people in to see our lives lived out, including some of the less pretty parts.

We generally launch marriages with public fanfare and then we live in solitary marriages. That is, we know little about the interior of one another's marriages. We tend to suffer alone in our distress; we tend not to know when another couple has a relationship cold or flu or worse. We don't have communities to rally around us when our marriages are hurting. ~ William Doherty

We ought to prize marriage as a community, as church, in a way that upholds it as a beautiful and precious thing. At the same time we ought also to honour and value singleness too. That is one of the most radical things about early Christianity as a social movement: in a world where you basically had to get married, Christians recognised in Jesus, Paul, and Paul's teachings, that widows didn't necessarily have to remarry, and that unmarried single people could remain so, celibate, in a life of true value, meaning, and dignity.

When a couple gets married in a church, there is a sense (sometimes explicit in the service) that the church community is going to help this couple to stay married. I have rarely seen that played out well. Yes, individuals take a part, but the failure is often more noticeable than the successes. Perhaps that is a kind of statistical bias. But to return to the couple mentioned earlier - he did not have a male friend who could see the troubles, and he didn't have a male friend who felt it was their place to speak to him. That is not necessarily his fault, but it is a failure - a failure of male friendship generally.

Male friendship is a difficult thing. I suspect it would not be hard for me to dig up some research and opinion pieces on its general decline in society. Most men, I dare say, lack deep friendships. But the solution to the problem is you (if you're a man reading this). Although, of course, it takes two people to be friends. But being intentional about being this kind of friend is something that must be chosen and worked on. Are there people in your life who could speak to you with the trust and honesty to hold you to marriage promises? Are there people in your life that you would be willing to start that conversation? If the answer is no, it's time to get to work.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about friendship this past year. Lee Austin's book still echoes in my mind. I also keep coming back to one of my favourite Keller sermons, about friendship. I don't think Keller exhausts the topic, but I think he nails the guts of it in a sermon format - a friend always lets you in and never lets you down. We want intimacy and fidelity. We want people to both know us deeply and love us for who we are, and it's our fear that when they know us better, they'll turn away, that often keeps us at a shallower level. And yet the deeper we get, the more vulnerable we become. It's why the betrayals of friendship sting so deeply - we let someone in and they let us down. And yet we must, we absolutely must, if we want to grow as human beings in relationship with others. We need these deeper friendships, and marriages need them too.

It takes a village to raise a child, we've of course all heard this by now. But I want to say that it takes a community to keep a marriage together. And for men, in particular, that means friends who are willing to take the risk of vulnerability in constructing relationships where one person can speak frankly to another, even woundingly, knowing that the underlying friendship is robust enough to survive the truth telling. [Pv 27.6a] But it does take vulnerability - it’s written into the meaning of the word (“able to be wounded”), and that is one more hard thing. Let’s get to it.

1. I did attempt to speak into one of these situations, to the extent I could given considerable distance at the time.

2. This is not to say that what I am talking about only applies to male friendships, just that that is my particular focus here.