Everyone wants a poetic love, even if women are quicker to admit it. The couples I work with as a Catholic marriage therapist are no different. Almost every wife eventually expresses some version of the following sentiment: “I want us to be able to look across the room, lock eyes, and know we’re thinking the same thing . . . and laugh.”
Is this desire a fairy tale? To the secular mind, perhaps. But as Catholics, we understand that God has written on the hearts of both men and women a yearning to participate in total, perfect communion with Him—a communion reflected in His design for marriage.
With such lofty aspirations for marriage, why do so many couples seem miserable? The internet’s relationship gurus offer many reasons, often blaming either men for falling short or women for having unrealistic expectations. While there may be some truth to both of these claims, they miss the bigger picture.
What a Successful Marriage Needs
While there are many ways a marriage can fail, there is only one way for it to succeed in its original purpose of helping both spouses get to Heaven. This is not simply a matter of treating each other well, raising kids, and serving one another. These are beautiful but secondary aspects of marriage. To answer God’s vocational call to marriage, we must spend a lifetime falling in love with God together, adoring Him first rather than each other.
While this idea may sound obvious, it is a radically different approach to marriage than what the world teaches. To the world, marriage is a declaration of love between two people that will hopefully last a lifetime. To the Christian, marriage is a sacramental bond between God and both spouses that is founded on a mutual devotion to Him and fortified by His grace.
To love God first means to find our deepest fulfillment in Christ. When we surrender our hearts to Him, God multiplies our love so that it spills over into our relationships, creating in our human families a reflection of the beautiful, self-giving love of the Holy Trinity.
After all, how could the one who adores God not fall in love with the beauty of humanity which bears His image? God gave us minds to ponder Him, hearts to adore Him, bodies to worship Him, and souls to commune with Him. He created us in His image so that we could know Him. Thus, when spouses gaze at one another out of love not only for each other but also for God, the look changes from, “I love you for what you can offer me,” to “I cannot help but love you as the one whom our perfect Lord declared a masterpiece.”
When Marriages Fall Apart
Problems arise, however, when we move God to the periphery. To place something or someone other than God on the throne of your heart is to worship a false idol. It is a transgression against the very first commandment He gave to Moses (see Exodus 20:1-17). And despite what some may believe, God’s commands do not exist for His sake. He needs nothing from us. Rather, He desires our loving obedience because He wants what is best for us. By making His first commandment a ban on idolatry, He shows us what will cause us the most harm. So, what is it about idolatry in marriage that is so destructive?
I got the title for this essay from a therapy session with one of my couples.* The wife proclaimed, with tears in her eyes, the root of her concerns for their relationship: Twenty-one years and five children later, they were “missing the poetry” in their marriage.
That phrase struck me.
At the time, it reflected the spouses’ mutual dissatisfaction. They longed for a joyful, uninhibited communion with one another, to feel like they were truly “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Yet despite their best efforts, their bond had become fractured by misunderstandings and resentment. By the time they started therapy, they had allowed their pain to distract them from Christ rather than encourage them to seek Him.
The Dangers of Idolatry in Marriage
Contrary to a culture that labels perfect love a “fairy tale,” the harmonious union we all desire is precisely what God created us to experience. Yet this desire cannot be fully satisfied between two people. So what are we to do? Must we suffer the ache of this longing until we die? Certainly not.
We are invited to find fulfillment of this desire in the only One Who can answer the deepest groans of our souls—the One Who died so that we could live. Our Father was thinking of each of us when He created Adam and Eve and called us “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Christ was thinking of each of us while He hung dying on the Cross.
The real danger of idolatry is that we reject God’s invitation to participate in the greatest love story of all time—the poetic melody He has been writing for us since the beginning. When we make each other gods, every disappointment or flaw becomes ruinous.
This happened to my couple in therapy. After spending years striving for the perfect marriage, they had forgotten the primary call of their vocation: to pursue God together rather than one another. We were made to sit in awe before our perfect Creator. A soul created for such greatness can only weep at the shortcomings of the gods it erects and places in Christ’s stead.
The Hidden Blessing in Our Flaws
Conversely, when we understand and accept God’s invitation to commune first with Him, marital disappointments can actually serve the crucial purpose of reminding us of His first commandment. Father Jacques Philippe says as much in his book, Interior Freedom:
“Those imperfections in others also help us not to look to others for happiness, plenitude, and fulfillment we can find only in God” (p. 70).
By abandoning ourselves into the arms of our Heavenly Father, we make space for Him to work miracles amid the messiness of family life. How many of His miracles might we miss because we have sold our love story short, looking to one another rather than to God as our ultimate love?
How much more could we enjoy one another’s presence if we realized that the poetry we’ve been missing has been there all along? We need only to lift our gaze to the One Whose breath brought us to life.
*To craft this story, I altered and combined details from multiple relationships to protect my clients’ anonymity while maintaining the essential message.
As a Catholic wife, mother, marriage therapist, and writer, Cameron Rechenmacher spends her days helping people love and serve God through their relationships. You can find more of her writing at www.modernmarriage.co.
