The stars in my eyes turned to clouds in my coffee

By Elizabeth Prata

It’s wedding season when so many young women get married. The flurry of bridal showers, wedding planning, caterers, dress fittings. Then the big day comes, it’s a high that a woman does not soon forget.

It does all go by fast, the day is a blur, but a happy one. Everything is fresh, new, dewy promises and hugs and handshakes and assurances and vows.

And then if they honeymoon, after the honeymoon’s over they return and sink into life. The routine of working, cleaning, cooking, chatting, fighting, resenting, making up. Repeat.

If a married biological biological woman and a man (for there is no other kind of marriage) are not saved by the blood of Christ what you have in marriage is the close proximity of two sinners competing for dominance of their own sin nature. In the case of non-saved couples, marriage is hard, one of the hardest things on earth, because you must not only mortify your own sin, but submit to one another.

Both saved and unsaved people intuitively understand that marriage is hard. When coming across a married couple that have stayed together for 30, 40, 50 years, they are looked at like a mythological creature. We are gazing upon a griffin or a unicorn. I often hear people wonderingly ask a long-term married couple, “What’s the secret?”

I remember that myself. We were visiting an old Italian nonnie in Providence Rhode Island. She wasn’t saved. They were 50 years married. The husband came ambling through, the wife playfully joked with her hubby and they had a brief moment of teenager-y interaction ending with a quick kiss. It could not have been any cuter than two kittens playing. We stared in wonder, as if we were at a zoo, gazing at them through glass, the placard beside it stating “Long-term Married Couple in Love. Species: Human. Habitat: Providence, RI.”

One of us in the group asked, “What’s the secret to a long marriage?” We breathlessly awaited the pronouncement, the answer to the key of life from someone who had unlocked it.

She took a deep breath, aimed a crooked, arthritic finger at us and said slowly, “You have to overlook a lot of things.”

We nodded sagely and let the moment have its moment, before resuming our conversation.

I got married when I was 22. The progression I had been taught to follow for a life plan was graduate high school, go to college, then get a graduate degree, get married, get a house, and have a career in academia. I was on that track. I was not saved yet.

I’d graduated from college the year before, my fiancé and I moved in together, spent the next year establishing ourselves in our city finding jobs etc. I became a substitute teacher (my ultimate goal was to earn a Ph.D and teach college, so teaching in an elementary school was a good first step while I saved up money for grad school). He wanted to be an engineer. We also spent the year preparing for the wedding.

The day came and I was happy. I really was. Yet I knew deep down this was not the man for me, but I had an idol of marriage and I stuck to it rigidly. I wanted the love and security I thought a marriage would provide- all on its own. I thought that stepping through the threshold of the marriage temple, that THEN everything would be all right. Automatically.

It wasn’t.

What we had were two sinners with competing self-interests. I became a golf widow pretty quickly (his idol was sports). He was gone all Sunday so I took that time to prepare my lesson plans for school. I had earned my teaching certificate and was teaching first grade.

Saturdays we had to spend at the in-laws. Every Saturday without fail, the bulk of the day at mom-in-law’s. I didn’t mind visiting, but it was the “have to” I found objectionable. I hated that he was tied to his mother’s apron strings and didn’t have the courage to say “My wife and I are having a picnic this Saturday…going to a movie…taking a drive to the mountains…” Nope. His mom came first, not his wife. We weren’t saved, so he didn’t know Genesis 2:24, that “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” Our marriage had 2 flesh, but one of them wasn’t mine.

We always piled in to the in-law’s living room and and there was never a question that every Saturday of our lives we’d would be doing this. The work week was, well, work. We never had time to ourselves.

A few years went on. Even though we were not saved, we had followed normal wedding protocol. Our wedding was in a Methodist church and there was a minister and the marriage vows. One of those vows was ‘forsaking all others’.

He didn’t.

but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. (Matthew 5:32)

He found someone else at work, fell in love with her, had an affair. Deep down I knew. His attention had dwindled. His temper was shorter. Always a nervous fellow, he was more antsy than ever before. He just didn’t want to be here. Emotionally, he wasn’t.

Adultery is a devastating sin. The Bible tells us that sexual sins are bad.

but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:28).

When you have two saved and forgiven sinners you have the help of the Holy Spirit to subdue the natural sin nature in us that wants its worldly lusts. Subdue the sin that wants to nurse bitterness. Subdue the sin that wants its selfish desires fulfilled. Subdue the sin that doesn’t know what it means to serve, sacrifice, and truly love. And it’s still hard!

Do not lust in your heart for her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes. (Proverbs 6:25)

Since a marital couple is one flesh, when one of them rips away to include an interloper into the marriage, the wound is deep, deep. Is the fleshly satisfaction of uniting with an adulteress or an adulterer worth it? No. There is shame, and conscience-pricking, and anger, and if there are children, they are wounded. Even if the sin isn’t caught out, it’s still a terrible sin.

In my case, he divorced me and married his lover. I am glad they found love, though neither was saved. They stayed together 30 years, until he died. But what is it to satisfy a lust, to declare one’s worldly love to and with another worldling, but forfeit your soul? I do not believe he ever repented and was saved. If not, he is paying for his adultery and divorce for all eternity. I am so grief stricken over that. Was 30 years of happiness worth it compared to an eternity of punishment for defying God?

It’s a mess and a tragedy. Don’t cheat. It’s awful.

Here is a resource for women:
Downloadable pdf- “False Messages: A Guide for the Godly Bride” by Aileen Challies

Here is a resource for men:
Blog with link to downloadable pdf- Sexual Detox

Book- The Exemplary Husband: A Biblical Perspective, by Stuart Scott and John MacArthur

Book- The Excellent Wife: A Biblical Perspective, by Martha Peace

Sermon- The Relationship of Marriage, No. 762, by C.H. Spurgeon

Blog- Bible Reading in the Marriage of Charles and Susannah Spurgeon, By Ray Rhodes, Jr

Book- Marriage to A Difficult Man: The Uncommon Union of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, by Elisabeth Dodds